After yesterday’s mailbag entry on royalties, our friend Ken Muse pointed me to a great breakdown of the current record deal math done by Cord Jefferson at The Root.

By the math in the article, the average “signed” musician makes $23.40 for every $1,000 of revenue earned by the label.

Think about it in terms of downloads. Get signed to a label, and sell 1,000 downloads in your first week of release. That’s still pretty respectable for most acts, and can even get you on some charts. With a coupon code, you can now have two pizzas delivered from Papa John’s.

So why bother? What can a record deal do for you that you can’t put together yourself?

How Much Do Musicians Really Make from Record Deals? originally appeared on spinme.com on July 23, 2010. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

From the mailbag, Mark wants to know about different kinds of royalties:

hey whats the diffrence between royalties and publishing revenue..

Cashmoneyrecords sighned a  deal with Unviersal Music

They keep 85% if tge royalties 50% publishing revenues and all master..

i dont get the diffrencce…….if you sell 1000000 ringtones, do you recive 85% of the royalties or 50 precent of the publish revenues…. Publish reveunues is the same as royalties isnntit?

second they got 30millon $ to…….so do they have to make 30 mill before they got paid??

please help……….love your site also

We’re actually talking about a few different kinds of ways that labels and artists make money, and Cash Money Records is a pretty interesting case study of how a company can grow from the ground up into a vertically integrated entertainment conglomerate.

First, let’s talk about royalties. Depending on your role in the recording, you could dip your hand in the cookie jar a few times:

• Mechanical royalties for writers and publishers (often called “The Publishing.”) Record labels have to pay a fixed fee every time a song gets pressed onto a CD or downloaded to a music player. That fee gets split between the writer and the publisher, usually 50/50. This fee gets paid out regardless of whether or not a project has turned a profit.
• Mechanical royalties for artists (which is what we often mean by “royalties.”) There’s no statutory fee paid for performers in the United States, though some musicians are fighting pretty hard to get this enacted here. A typical record deal will set a mechanical royalty per “unit,” and crafty negotiators will lobby for terms that base the amount on units “pressed” instead of units “delivered.” (With digital downloading so prevalent, though, it seems like this distinction is disappearing.) Most record deals withhold this amount to the artist until all expenses are cleared, which usually means never.
• Sync licensing. If your song lands in a commercial, film, or television show, everybody gets some cash. Land on something that gets replayed in reruns or sold on DVDs, and everybody can make a LOT of cash.
• Performing rights royalties for writers. As your song gets played on the radio, in clubs, or on streaming music services, you’ll enjoy a cut of a “royalty pool” administered by ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC. There’s no truly effective way to measure exactly what gets played where, so agencies sample radio stations, club playlists, and concert setlists to determine what seems “about right” from quarter to quarter. If you’re riding a Top 40 wave, expect a big check. And if you’re not maintstream, but you’re lucky enough to have a song on the radio during a sampling session, you’ll get a nice, little check.

Let’s say you’re a singer/songwriter, and you’ve got an album of ten original songs. The accounting’s pretty easy. Sell a million records, and you’ll bring in your half of the “publishing.” You may also have been clever enough to set yourself up as the “publisher” to collect the other half. So that’s about $100k right there. Your record company will probably find some way to tell you that you’re still “upside down” on the expenses of selling a million albums. That means they won’t pay you any additional royalties, but you’ll console yourself with a solid check once you’ve got a song on Grey’s Anatomy.

If you’re a high profile artist (or producer), you can even demand an advance against your future royalties. Let’s say I own a label and I want you on my roster so badly, I’m willing to give you your first $30 million up front. For instance, when R.E.M. signed their second deal with Warner Brothers, they got an $80 million advance. (It’s arguable that Warner Brothers lost that bet, with slumping record sales keeping the band from ever hitting that level on the second deal.)

Now, let’s look at Cash Money Records. They signed a deal with Universal Records that brought a whole lot of talent to that major label under an integrated production company. Instead of a single singer/songwriter, there’s a stable of artists, producers, and writers, essentially working on staff. By most accounts, the Williams Brothers that started the label used the Universal deal to cash out, leaving a business template in place that some folks like to compare to Motown Records. A factory-style setup, with a collective of artists signed to deals that give them exposure while depositing most of their signed-away royalties into the label’s accounts.

Even though publishing royalties are statutory, there’s nothing saying that you can’t sell or trade those payments away in exchange for a lump sum. A label can also act as a publisher, pulling that “publisher’s share” off the top. Although I don’t know the specifics of Cash Money’s deal with Universal, many imprint deals involve the larger label funneling mechanical royalties to the smaller label. The small label becomes a middleman, funneling royalties down from the major to artists and producers. A deal like this means Cash Money acts as if it were artist, publisher, and producer, collecting royalties and redistributing them to its talent based on their individual development deals.

In the 1990s, we often looked at deals like these as easy ways for labels to screw over artists. In the 2010s, we’re seeing artists run their own labels this way, actually maximizing their profits.

It’s a good time to run your own publishing company AND your own record label.

Mailbag: Royalties vs. Publishing originally appeared on spinme.com on July 22, 2010. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Katie Evans uses her entertainment column in Forbes to explore some of the ways that bands raise money from fans beyond traditional CD sales. (And, as I’ve been writing about for the last ten years, CD sales are just about the last thing you want to rely on as an artist to keep your bills paid.)

One of the interesting things that slipped by me when things were happening in real time: Jill Sobule set up a Kickstartr-style fundraising effort that pulled in $85,000 toward the production costs of her new album. Meanwhile, Public Enemy tried to launch a project on Sellaband with a $250,000 budget. They raised only about $75,000.

Those results say more about an audience’s expectation for what albums really cost to make than they do about overall fan support. It’s actually getting relatively easy to find 1,000 fans willing to give you $75 or $100 toward an album you haven’t made yet. Ten years ago, this would have been nearly impossible. (It also speaks to the idea that Jill’s fans understand that this is her income. Public Enemy’s fans might not feel like they need the money.)

However, fans have become more savvy about what it really takes to make an album. You can get relatively inexpensive gear and make your record at home, or you can travel out to a small town and hole up in an affordable recording studio for weeks at a time. If anybody should be worried, it’s the folks who own really expensive recording studios in places like New York and Los Angeles.

When fans foot the bill, a $50,000 producer’s fee is simply unacceptable. When fans foot the bill, they’re also expecting that about half of their donation is going to sustain you for the time you’ll be off the road, making the record. Take a year to make that record, and you can live off $35,000, as long as you can spend less than $40,000 to bring the record in on time.

Jill wrote on her blog about the accountability that fan involvement brought to the project, especially when she invited some of her supporters into the studio. It was a different experience from having meddling label executives and producers fiddling with the knobs and poking at her lyrics. When fans invest in you, it’s because they want more of what they already love, not because they’re concerned about what they might be able to market to today’s hottest demographic.

[ photo credit: "Warm and Happy," by Flickr user jurvetson, used under CC license. ]

Forbes: Jill Sobule Raised More Than Public Enemy originally appeared on spinme.com on June 1, 2010. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

From this weekend’s New York Times, Ben Sisario covers the growing trend of large concert promoters offering special perks and souvenirs to help justify the prices of VIP tickets to this summer’s hot tours.

The article’s centerpiece: Bon Jovi fans paid $1,875 each for a luxury event package that includes a leather bag, a “catered meal,” and a front row seat in a logo-embossed folding chair. You get to keep the chair. When you think about it, this is awesome if you’re the promoter: your audience pays you for the privilege of clearing folding chairs off their field at the end of a stadium gig.

I’ve written before about the power of variable pricing. It puts more profit into the hands of artists instead of into the pockets of scalpers. Set aside any bitterness you might have against large concert promoters. It’s not about whether Live Nation or AEG Live can justify charging $2,000 for a concert ticket. It’s about rising audience expectation about what they’re going to get for their money, even if you’re only talking about a $10 or $15 cover charge.

If you’re creating custom merch for each gig, or for each circuit of your never-ending tour, you’re creating added value for your fans. If you’re creating memorable experiences by hanging out at the bar before or after your gig, fans are much more likely to remember how you made sure they had fun. (Though, after nine bottles of Jager, John’s fans might not remember.)

[photo credit: Laser cut folding chairs, under CC]

$1,875 for Front Row Seats, But You Get to Keep the Chair originally appeared on spinme.com on May 22, 2010. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Alexandra Patsavas, probably the most influential music supervisor working today, took some time to answer questions at the Billboard/Hollywood Reporter Film & TV Music Conference, along with estate manager Jeffrey Jampol.

It’s interesting to see how that discussion played out. Jampol, whose job is to protect the heritage of his legacy rock estates, cautioned acts against licensing just for a paycheck. Fans might think you’re cheapening your music if you accept the wrong deal.

Patsavas countered, as I would have, that today’s generation of music fans is a little different. After all, Of Montreal has an Outback Steakhouse ad, and they’re doing fine.

With anything you do, it’s important to maintain integrity and credibility. It’s also important to remember that reality shows and other entertainment programming (like the series that license from Pump Audio) have a tendency to come and go, while beloved albums hang around for decades. Nobody’s going to remember if your song was in “The Biggest Loser,” but the check you earned from that placement might have been the cash you needed to convince yourself to keep writing music.

(Remember, David Hooper is still enrolling folks into his new, hybrid tip-sheet/licensing course.)

More Discussion about Film & TV Licensing originally appeared on spinme.com on November 14, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

All of my tech friends are pinging me about the article on TechCrunch about Warner Music Group’s demands that any new signed acts must agree to a “360 Deal.”

Traditionally, a record company would sign a deal with an artist that set specific royalty rates for each copy of a record sold. In exchange, the label would front the investment money for the recording while applying their substantial promotion and marketing prowess to the task of getting records sold. Along the way, any expenses incurred in the process would become “recoupable” against those royalties.

In a nutshell, albums would get made, but artists would rarely see a penny outside of their statutory songwriting royalties. That’s because labels would find ways to extract every single cent from artist payments by deducting every cell phone call, every bottle of water, and every regional promoter’s cat litter bills from the artist’s escrow account.

That was fine, though, since artists really make money from movie and TV licensing, from fan club memberships, from merchandise, and from live concerts. Managers and label owners tolerated each other long enough to get a contract signed, and the world kept spinning.

Live Nation’s Best Idea Ever

Along comes Live Nation, a revived company formed from the ashes of Clear Channel, the shell of SFX, and the brain of MusicToday. Clem Chambers called it months ago: by leveraging the footprint of the most desirable concert venues in the country with the prowess of the industry’s most successful marketers, Live Nation actually found a way for itself and for musicians to make money. As a result, it started a new music business precedent: “360 deals,” in which Live Nation acts as label, promoter, presenter, and gift shop. For major touring acts, it’s a no brainer. Ditch the major labels, cash a fat advance check, and head out on the road.

So now, with record sales in free-fall, Edgar Bronfman is telling all comers that he won’t sign an act unless his label gets the same kind of deal. If Warner had the same kind of promotional clout as Live Nation, this might make sense. But I can’t see handing over an extra 10-30% of an act’s income to a company that’s already failing to pay artist royalties in an era where artists still have to do all of their promotion. On top of that, recognizing that the cost of producing high quality records has come way down, where is the benefit of actually signing with a label like Warner?

Song Sharks Using 360 Deals to Lure Unsigned Acts

Here’s what’s even worse, in my opinion. Bronfman’s statements are legitimizing a trend among small labels that are already indistinguishable from song sharks. I’m hearing more and more from independent musicians who are being approached by so-called A&R scouts who promise fame and fortune in exchange for up to 66% of their overall earnings.

When you’re already broke, and dreaming of stardom, 66% of nothing is nothing, so it feels good to actually consider this kind of a deal. Here’s why these folks are ripping you off:

• No legitimate music business manager, even in this economic climate, will request more than 15% of an act’s net profit. Managers make money on the back end, just like you do.
• If you don’t already have 1,000 fans on your mailing list, a record label isn’t close to being in a position to help you.
• Consider any professional offering services the same way you would select a doctor, a dentist, or a real estate agent. What’s their track record? Who have they actually produced? If they’re new at the business, that’s fine — they should be commanding a smaller rate than someone who’s got some gold records on the wall.
• Any deal you make early in your career that hands over a chunk of your revenue will make you less attractive to more experienced professionals. If you get big enough to be courted by Live Nation, they’re going to want a piece of the whole pie, not the 75% or 50% that’s left over after the deal you’re thinking about.

As always, I remain convinced that record labels make great pressing & distribution partners. I wouldn’t sign a deal that allowed them to charge my act for promotion, unless I knew exactly who was going to do that work for us and what their strategy was.

And, as always, make sure you run every prospective legal agreement by an experienced entertainment attorney. $300 spent now can save you thousands or even millions of dollars down the road.

When Does a 360 Music Deal Make Sense? originally appeared on spinme.com on November 13, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

You may remember the time that David Hooper and I spent seven hours on a conference call just taking Q&A from folks who wanted to make money making music.

I don’t think he has a similar marathon planned for tonight, but he is hosting another free teleseminar on ways that you can license your music to television, film, and video game producers. Licensing is the “final frontier” for independent musicians, and it’s a great way to earn a significant amount of revenue while putting your music in front of potential audience members.

From a return on investment point of view, music licensing can be easier for some musicians than playing gigs or trying to get radio airplay. Because producers are looking for a feeling more than they are looking for name acts, many music supervisors take a really open approach to reviewing demos from unsigned acts. David’s spent the last few years working in Nashville really focusing on this piece of the business, and he’s put some videos together that go along with tonight’s seminar. It’s all free, and you can sign up to learn about music licensing here.

Learn How to License Your Music to Television and Film originally appeared on spinme.com on November 6, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

After hearing so much great response from our profile of Drexel’s campus-based music business program, I’m noticing more stories about schools that model their student-run record labels and booking agencies along the same principles. This week, the Los Angeles Times profiles a school that’s offering the same kind of real world experience, only at a high school level.

Students attending the Music Academy at Hamilton High School launched A6 Records, a production collective that evolved into a full-fledged and profitable record label. Promoting releases required marketing gigs, so students started booking shows for their signed acts. And the label is starting to have an impact on the neighborhood’s micro-scene: winners of a recent Battle of the Bands won a working trip to Ireland and a record deal.

Technology levels the playing field in so many ways, and it amazes me every time I talk to kids who are fourteen or fifteen years old who don’t know that the gear they got for their birthdays used to cost more than a Maserati when I was their age. Because they know the gear so well, they know that they’ve got to work harder to get their material noticed. Every time I hear an artist complain about how hard it is to get a record made or a show booked, I’m starting to wonder if I need to refer them to a group of these very eager high school kids.

Image courtesy Stock Exchange member duchesssa.

Music Business Education Reaching High Schools originally appeared on spinme.com on May 8, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Two years ago, as Billy Bragg tells it, the founder of British social networking site Bebo came to him for advice about avoiding the same music licensing pitfalls that Bragg had railed about during the evolution of MySpace. As I wrote previously, Bragg’s lobbying resulted in MySpace clarifying its terms of service so artists could retain copyright of works they posted online. Since then, other online services have followed suit, assuring musicians at all stages of their careers that they would not accidentally close off revenue streams by uploading songs to social networking sites.

Bebo grew so big that AOL purchased the service for “a staggering $850 million,” as Bragg writes in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. Billy makes the case that a social networking service that builds audiences around original music should pay a dividend to those musicians

There’s some precedent for this in the online world, too. When Yahoo! purchased Flickr, Pro account members got their accounts extended. When Yahoo! purchased Upcoming, musicians and other contributors got free t-shirts. (I still wear mine.) If Bebo’s founders walk away with about $600 million in their pockets, why not at least extend some gesture of thanks to the folks who helped bring users to the service in the first place?

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington calls musicians “crazy” for thinking they deserve a penny from services like Bebo. Social networking sites allow artists to gain exposure for their work. However, as I wrote about in all four of my books, simply gaining exposure does not guarantee an income. For decades, courts have upheld the rights of artists to collect royalties for work that is used beyond purely promotional purposes. This is the same principle that film and television writers spent months on strike defending.

Unfortunately, songwriters do not hold the same kind of bargaining power that screenwriters do.

As we observed in the ongoing struggle to find a workable royalty scheme for webcasters, a small group of already-established songwriters hold enough sway with Washington to produce license structures that are simply unaffordable for tech startups. At the same time, amateur songwriters are so desperate for exposure and attention that they willingly give up their existing rights in order to live the dream — forty or fifty listeners at a time.

This is where I think Arrington is not understanding Bragg’s argument. If 10,000 musicians each decide to bring their 40-50 existing fans into a service like Bebo, the service gains half a million users. The aggregation here is around musicians and their fans, not the other way around. Musicians add more value to a social networking platform, than vice versa. Bebo didn’t make anyone famous. Musicians brought subscribers to Bebo, and Bebo cashed in. That’s why Billy’s pissed.

How can tech startups compensate artists fairly? A “per-play” royalty, like the agreement under which webcasters currently suffer, helps nobody. However, a revenue sharing agreement through existing performance rights organizations that mirrors the agreements signed by the WGA can eliminate this argument while clearing a path for musicians to collaborate more openly and aggresively with tech companies. I can assure you that any startup social networking site that compensates musicians for the number of times their song is played and/or the number of new users they refer to a site should do pretty well.

And, at the same time, it’s up to artists to develop the skills and the support teams to leverage any exposure that does come from pages on MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, and any other services that bubble up over the next few years. At the end of the day, even the royalties artists earn from traditional radio airplay aren’t a whole lot — they’re just fair compensation for musician-assisted commerce.

Bebo Sale Spotlights Online Music Licensing Controversy originally appeared on spinme.com on March 23, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

When I was in school — and I did have to walk uphill in the snow to get to class, so get off my lawn — the campus radio station was where you had to be if you wanted a career in the music business. I chose Ithaca over Syracuse and Temple as soon as I found out that you could get your hands on the mixing board as a freshman.

These days, with online broadcasting, blogs, and podcasts, it seems like college radio is a ghost town at most schools. As an advisor to students at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years, I watched it get harder and harder to attract talented students to volunteer radio gigs. After all, who wants to slog through a 3a-7a overnight shift — the radio industry’s unique form of hazing — when you can just whip an hour-long podcast together in about ten minutes using GarageBand? (Fortunately, my alma mater’s two radio stations are still going strong.)

If you’re an enterprising university official, and you want to create a greenhouse for future music business professionals, applying the campus media model to a working record label is a daring and effective move. It’s what Drexel University did in 2003, as a logical progression to an informal growth of music business activity on that campus. Throughout the late 90′s, I had watched — from across Market Street — at what the kids over there were doing, even when it didn’t earn them any credit. And I certainly got jealous when I saw Drexel alums get picked for regional music promotion jobs over my own interns.

What’s Drexel doing right? They’re actually giving students a working lab where they can sign acts — some of whom have been dropped by major labels — and launch full length albums. The creative restraints imposed on MAD Dragon Records — staff pressed for time, limited budgets, interns with fractured schedules — aren’t so different from those faced by executives at Warner and Universal. They have a distribution deal through Ryko, which forces them to focus on a blend of online and in-person marketing. Therefore, relationships with independent record stores are still important — just as they should be for

Some closing thoughts on this neat student record label:

• I wonder if their University’s public relations manager loves them as much as ours was fond of our radio station. (In 1992, we wound up doing some major spin control over a promotion that went hilariously afoul. The cops were called, and I ended up on an elderly woman’s front porch, apologizing profusely. You can ask Andy, it’s his fault.)
• Do they rotate A&R professionals every semester? Because that would jibe with the length of time that most of my A&R buddies spend in a position before being transferred or taking a new gig.
• Knowing that a similar project is evolving at the University of Georgia, I wonder if there will be a trade association for college record labels, just ilke we had the National Association of College Broadcasters back in the day. CRIAA?

UPDATE: Their label roster includes Jules Shear. WHA?? But there’s something goofy going on with their all-Flash website, so I can’t click deeper to learn more. You’re an engineering school — please fix that code!

Drexel’s Student-Run Record Label Reshaping Music Business Education originally appeared on spinme.com on March 15, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

This week’s sponsor:

Seems like everyone’s on the free bandwagon this week. I don’t know if this was on the site before the Oscar win, but you can download a copy of “Falling Slowly” in MP3 with no DRM, right from the Fox Searchlight website.

Download “Falling Slowly” from the Once Soundtrack for Free originally appeared on spinme.com on February 26, 2008. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

It’s a $42 million price tag for Pump Audio, the little independent music rights clearing house that could. I remember that, when they first launched, Pump Audio looked dangerously like one of the song sharks we often write about here. But they reached out to the independent music community and did a great job building relationships with established music supervisors and video production professionals. By providing a well-curated library of ready to license tracks for the booming cable/satellite and online video markets, they’ve been putting more than just spare change into the pockets of their musicians — the company did over $10 million worth of business last year. This, in a sector of the business where tape editors still sometimes look the other way and tell bands that “exposure is good enough.” (Exposure + $25 is even better, IMHO.)

Today, Getty Images purchased Pump Audio, which offers the chance for music licensing to make another quantum leap. Creative directors at ad agencies and television editors in post houses all rely on Getty to make stock image licensing easy and fast. By plugging Pump Audio into that established network of Getty clients, Pump Audio’s music library just became incredibly legit to a big, influential crowd. Instead of the creative industry’s best kept secret, they’re going to be way more out in the open, which means good things for artists who offer up a portion of their catalogs for sync licensing.

Congrats to the whole team at Pump Audio, who managed to push a rock uphill and keep it there.

Technorati Tags: music+business, pump+audio

Getty Images Buys Pump Audio originally appeared on spinme.com on June 20, 2007. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

It’s not the first time we’ve covered the issue here, but amidst the horror story that has become the chart of overall music sales, there’s a quiet confidence among the owners of America’s finest record stores. The Columbia Free Times devotes an exceptional amount of space to the truth that a record store owner who clearly loves his or her niche and understands how to create a real experience for customers can continue to thrive in a music-as-water world.


Technorati Tags: music+business, record+stores

How Local Record Stores Can Stay in Business originally appeared on spinme.com on May 9, 2007. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

While our regular readers ask me that question all the time, another group of people is just as curious about the answer — Wall Street.

Clem Chambers from the investment website ADVFN offers a guest commentary in Forbes Magazine about his ideas for the real winners and losers in the entertainment industry shakeout. While he’s not sure how the big players like record labels and movie studios will fare in a world where file sharing runs rampant, he loves the prospects for event production companies like Live Nation and hardware manufacturers like Sony.

After all, audiences still love to see bands perform live, even if they’re swapping files on their new VAIOs.


Technorati Tags: music+business, live+nation

Where can you still make money in the music business? originally appeared on spinme.com on April 7, 2007. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.

Via Bob, I learned about this interesting attempt to game the downloadable singles chart, the way that authors often do at Amazon.com. By coordinating a whole lot of purchases through iTunes, the organizers hope to land a podsafe single by a band that has been dumped from two major label contracts onto the charts.

Here’s what I find interesting about the discussion the project’s generating. Unlike authors, who can make an hour-by-hour splash on Amazon’s very transparent book ranking pages, musicians don’t have such easy access to statistics. We might not know what effect this will have for days or weeks. In addition, music buyers are far more skeptical about this project than book buyers, even though the amount of the purchase is only 99 cents (versus $12 or more for a book).

Because the appeal is coming from podcasters who want to make a statement, and not from the band itself, a lot of folks are feeling “meh” about the whole thing. (Some folks don’t want to send money to iTunes. Some folks feel like it’s a hidden RIAA conspiracy. Some folks just don’t like the song.) So, as Bob also wonders, I imagine what would happen if a very organized purchasing campaign grew up through an artist’s street team and had more passion behind it. We already know that 5,000 is a magic number, and 1,325 folks have already dugg this story.

What noise could you make if you got 5,000 people to buy your single?

Technorati Tags: music+business, bum+rush+the+charts, podsafe, RIAA, iTunes

Bum Rush the Charts Day originally appeared on spinme.com on March 22, 2007. If you are reading this in a feed reader, you rule. If you are seeing this post included on another website, it is in violation of our terms of use.