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For Rock Bands, Selling Out Isn't What It Used to Be
(Page 4 of 5)
From the advance, they spent $13,000 on a vintage tape machine to
get the right sound for the album. The band members each took $1,000 for living expenses. The rest went
to buy equipment and record the album. On tour, the band plays about 100 shows a year and makes
between $250 and $2,500 at each, or about enough to break even, plus whatever they can pick up selling
CD's and T-shirts at the gig -- on average about $100. They keep their touring costs low, and live on
meatless Big Macs. "The fans must think we're making hundreds of thousands of dollars," Robert says.
In truth, Robert and Hilarie had been doing temp jobs and telemarketing to help pay their $825-per-month
rent for one-half of a two-family house. They still cannot afford the Sony Wega television for which their
song was used.
For some musicians, ads can be a windfall. Songs by major acts fetch up to several million dollars;
even acts you've never heard of can negotiate as much as $250,000, if the advertiser wants the song
badly enough. "There is no menu of prices for music," says Alan Pafenbach, executive vice president and
group creative director at Arnold Worldwide. "It's what the people who own the music think it means to you."
In practice, though, breakthroughs like Moby's are rare. For the Apples in Stereo, the money was more
stopgap and the exposure of limited value. To hear 15 seconds of an unidentified song during a break in
"Friends" is not necessarily to fall in love. But from the ad came more offers: from J. C. Penney and Bank
of America; from the TV series "Roswell," an ABC after-school special and the animated series "The
Power Puff Girls." This all amounted to about another $19,000 for the band. It was free money, unsolicited,
for which they didn't have to play a gig or do an interview. It allowed them to carve a little comfort even if they
were selling just 20,000 albums.
"There's a music industry stereotype that bands are going to thrive or burn out," says Beth Urdang,
a former bass player and ad executive who recently started her own firm, Agoraphone, to find obscure,
affordable, cool music for ads and films. "All this soundtrack and advertising work creates a musical middle
class that's not dependent on selling records at all."
To license a recording, advertisers have to pay for two copyrights: the composition and the performance
itself, or master. If musicians own these copyrights, licensing can be exceptionally lucrative. More often,
though, the copyrights are held wholly or in part by bigger companies -- music publishers on the one hand,
record companies on the other. In each case, musicians sign away their future rights for cash up front; they
get further payments only after this advance has been recouped. Depending on the contract, publishers
can generally license compositions without the writers' permission, but acts can often veto use of their
master recordings.
Under this setup, "it's very hard for an artist to pocket the cash" from an ad, says Richard Grabel, a
lawyer who represents alternative musicians, including Sonic Youth and Liz Phair. Though recording and
publishing contracts usually call for splitting any "third party" revenues with performers, Grabel says, in
reality, the band probably owes more than its cut against its advance. Performers have to wheedle for a
cut from the record company, Grabel says, in exchange for granting permission on the masters. The
Apples in Stereo never signed a publishing deal, so they were able to keep the publishing payments.
But they had to split the master royalties with the record company to pay back various advances.
Then the ads hit the fans. Bands on the level of the Apples in Stereo take pride in keeping little distance
between themselves and their audiences -- hanging out after shows, sometimes crashing on someone's
couch. Even before the ads, Hilarie says, it had gotten so she didn't like to read the comments posted by
fans on Internet message boards. This was their community, the nurturing pool of its shared values and
aspirations, but it could feel small-minded and mean, the hothouse zealotry of adolescence. Their sense
of righteous grievance ran so deep and was so easily tweaked. "They criticized every move," she says. After
the J. C. Penney ad ran, they got a letter from a fan wondering how they could be that desperate; did
they need the money for an operation or something?
Continued
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