where does the money go ?

[xxxxx]

i have heard that musical artists typically recieve a dollar or two from the sale of a $10 album. i was wondering if anyone knows how the money from an anime dvd gets divied up. i have heard stories that the guys who actually do the art aren't paid that much...

[Trunksgirl07]

You're correct the actual artists don't get paid very much. There are a lot of people to pay like Producer, Artists, Supervisors, Paint/color supervisors, director and like 100 other people, so if a movie made only $100 for the month you wouldn't expect much money on your paycheck.

[pumpkinchick28]

i have heard that musical artists typically recieve a dollar or two from the sale of a $10 album.

Wow, a dollar or two? That'd be great. Actually it's more like a few cents, assuming said musical artist has a contract with a major recording label.

By the way, this thread may interest you.

[Kalium]

Wow, a dollar or two? That'd be great. Actually it's more like a few cents, assuming said musical artist has a contract with a major recording label.

With the major labels, it's a few cents per track on the CD. So an artist with a good contract might get a dollar per CD, at 5 cents per track and 20 tracks. Of course, a metric ton of recording costs are taken out of that by the record companies, so yeah..... The artist gets the royal shaft.

[xxxxx]

if that is so might it not be more ethical to write a check to the animators if a person was to download anime off the internet as opposed to purchasing a dvd?

[Zarxrax]

Animators are not the "artists" in the same sense that musicians are. In fact the animators don't really have any say in the artisticness of the anime at all. They are just handed work and told "draw this", and they perform there job repetitively and mundanely. Now I'm not trying to downplay their work, but they don't CREATE the anime, they just do the dirty work. The real credit goes to the person that wrote the storyline and designed the characters and such.

[DDramone]

yeah, i think most artists get most of their money doin live shows, but artists still get fucked. royally.

[pumpkinchick28]

Wow, a dollar or two? That'd be great. Actually it's more like a few cents, assuming said musical artist has a contract with a major recording label.

With the major labels, it's a few cents per track on the CD. So an artist with a good contract might get a dollar per CD, at 5 cents per track and 20 tracks.

Actually, that's only assuming that the artists wrote their own songs (and that's probably not something one should assume, considering the state of the music industry in America), in which case they get paid every time a track is played on the radio, but that's only for the first 10 tracks (I think it's 10...might be 8 actually) of a CD. Their label retains the copyright on any tracks following the 10th, which is why so few artists put more than 10 or 12 songs on one disc. Unless something drastic has changed in the past couple of years (was a music business major in college), artists are paid per CD. More specifically, the artist is given an overall small percentage of the total profit made from selling of CDs, t-shirts, dvds, etc. And another percentage is taken out of that amount for recording costs, marketing costs, etc.

Oh, and "good contracts" are virtually non-existant. Almost all recording contracts are the same, unless the artist in question has some sway over the label, which in almost all cases means they've already been through one regular (or "bad" if you want to be honest about it) contract.

[Kalium]

I was under the impression that all artist with the major music labels had to sign "work for hire" forms, giving all copyrights to the label anyway.

And by good, I meant relatively speaking.

[pumpkinchick28]

I was under the impression that all artist with the major music labels had to sign "work for hire" forms, giving all copyrights to the label anyway.

Actually, that's true, but only in the case of the actual recording of the music. The copyright of the recording is retained by the label under the "work for hire" clause, but if the artist actually wrote his own music, he/she retains the copyright of the song itself. And they get royalties everytime the song is played on the radio, at a club, etc. So it's much much much (can't emphasize this enough) MUCH easier to make money as a songwriter than it is to make money as just a musician.