There's an article in the latest issue of Wired that has David Byrne talking to Thom Yorke of Radiohead about their pay-what-you-like digital release of In Rainbows. An interesting quote caught my eye:
Byrne: Are you making money on the download of In Rainbows?
Yorke: In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.
What I wonder about this quote is how Yorke is using the term "any money". Does he literally mean that they receive nothing for sales of their previous works through, say, iTMS? Or does he mean they just receive a pittance, like the $.11 per song model discussed here?
Either way, It really surprised me. I guess I was under the impression that artists received a much larger portion of the proceeds from online sales (and perhaps maybe now they do, if they have recently-signed contracts) that from CD sales. I'm not sure where I got that idea.
Does anyone have any data on what is 'standard' in contracts written now? If I pay $.99 for the newest song a debut artist, how much money is that person actually getting?