For a triple j mag feature story published earlier in the year - entitled ‘Music Counts For Something’; full article here - I interviewed a handful of Australian independent musicians to discuss the financial realities of pursuing their passion.
Besides hip-hop artist Urthboy - full interview here - I also phone-interviewed Julian Hamilton of Sydney electronic duo The Presets [pictured right], whose ARIA Award-winning 2008 album Apocalypso is one of the highest selling Australian records of this decade.
Our conversation involves discussing music and money. Specifically - what proportion of musicians’ income consists of music sales?
Andrew: I know you weren’t too keen to discuss income specifics, so let’s talk about percentages. Is that okay?
Julian: Of course. You can ask me whatever you like, but I obviously can’t give you direct figures. I guess it’s very hard, it’s a bit awkward talking about specifics about what I earn personally, but it’s also tricky because the way that musicians earn money is so varied and so many different revenue streams, coming at different times. One month you might make no money. Another month you might make hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, based on just what’s happened possibly six months ago or a year ago. It’s kind of tricky to put a specific on a weekly wage.
Outside of an album cycle - which The Presets are right now, since you’re not touring, and album sales are ongoing, based on public interest - could you put a percentage figure on what your monthly income would be, purely from music sales?
It would be very hard. It’s strange because the way that albums kind of sell, you’ll often see money coming in way down the track. If someone buys a record in February, you might not see the money from that album sale until February the next year, just because it takes so long for the money to sort of go from the distributor to the record company, and the record company to the band company, and then for our accountant to finally get our hands on it after the taxes and all that stuff. It takes a very, very long time.
A lot of people might think that when you see a band and they’re touring and their album kind of blows up and goes number one, it doesn’t mean the next week someone gets the cash in their account for another year. Even though – it’s funny, I guess we’d still be sort of making money now from record sales from when we were selling heaps of them, when it was kind of big last year. Then of course, overseas sales take even longer to come through and it’s very tricky to pin down particular figures from particular times.
I’ve had this conversation with a few artists, and they’ve said much the same thing. I understand that.
Back in the old days, with older bands when we were just playing, we’d buy a box of 50 CDs off our record company and then we’d sell them on the road, at the end of the show we’d sell 12 CDs or something and they’d go “great, we’ve got $120” or whatever we were selling them for, that very night. But things have certainly changed a lot since then because there are so many different levels. The money sort of flows through until Kim and I get our hands on it.
It’s more complicated now, I suppose.
As you get bigger and bigger, it gets more complicated.
I should give you a bit more background info on where I’m coming from with this story. The idea came to me because I get this feeling that, as you mentioned, when people see that you’re getting played on triple j, or that your album’s number one, that immediately translates into ‘you’re rich’ or ‘you’ve made it’, when for many bands, that’s not the case.
That’s right. Make no mistake, if you’re getting huge airplay, you do become rich, but just not the very next week. It does happen eventually. If a band is clever and is not being ripped off by people and if the band writes their own material, which we do and I guess a lot of bands that get played on triple j would, and if they’re getting a shit load of airplay, then they do get paid and they get paid well for it. I guess it takes a very long time to get to that position.
What percentage of The Presets’ overall income would be derived from music sales?
Not the largest percentage, because probably the most money that we would make would be from writing the songs and what is referred to as publishing. If you write a song, the readers might know this or might not know this, but if you write a song, every time that song gets played on the radio you get paid a few cents. Every time it gets played on TV, every time it gets played at a club, or every time you perform it on stage at a festival, APRA - which is a body in Australia then collect royalties on your behalf – you get paid as the writer. That would be the main way that we make money as musicians, as The Presets, has been the writing of the songs, as being the copyright holders of the writing. After that, I’d guess we probably make more money from touring, and then after that is probably record sales.
So if you were to guess a percentage, what would that be?
It’d probably be around a third or quarter, off the top of my head. You might find it the same with a lot of bands. There’s not much in money to be made just in record sales. These days, if you want to be a working musician can’t just rely on record sales to make money. You need to start looking at other things, like trying to get your music played on television shows or trying to put on a good tour and put on good shows, performances that people want to come to. Or try to design some cool t-shirts and sell at shows. There are heaps of other ways to make a living out of being in a band than just selling CDs.
And it does depend on what kind of artist you are. I spoke to Gotye for this, and he mentioned his income would be about 70% because he doesn’t tour that often and that’s where most of his money comes from. But he tours with The Basics as well, and he said 15% probably comes from album sales and the rest is from touring and publishing.
Yeah, that’s right. That’s why these days you might find record companies where they do deals with bands that are really interested in doing deals that include merchandise, t-shirts and stuff, and also touring because record companies have caught onto this that while bands don’t see that much profit from selling CDs, they might make $2.00 or $3.00 off of every CD sold; meanwhile bands can make much more money going on the road and doing touring or like I said, they’ll sell a t-shirt for maybe $40.00 and they’ll make $30.00 profit from it. The record companies are now doing deals where they not only get a cut from the record, they also get it from merchandise sales and touring sales and all that kind of stuff.
You’re referring to 360 deals, as they’re called?
Yeah, are you going to be talking about that in the story?
No, that’s probably too much information for the small amount of space that I’ve got. That percentage you mentioned - a quarter, or a third of your income - did that align with your expectations when you first became a musician?
Yeah it did. I guess Kim and I have both been working as musicians for a long time and we realised long ago that if you’re really serious about making music, making a living from it, it was about writing songs and copyright, holding a copyright as a writer. So we knew that. Record sales are not really the place to make money first, except for the writing. In that respect yeah, it’s definitely what I expected. Most of the money we make is from writing, not really from sales. But, don’t get me wrong, bands that sell half a million CDs make money from selling CDs.
Do you think people are more likely to buy music in 2010, or less likely?
I think just as likely as in other times. I guess I wouldn’t know. I know that these days kids listen to music in different ways; they don’t rush out and buy CDs anymore. They’re just as happy to jump onto a band’s MySpace and listen to a song, or watch it on YouTube. They don’t really need to own the CD anymore. That being said, we’ve sold hundreds of thousands of CDs so people must still be buying CDs. I’m sure there’s hundreds of thousands more that are out there that are just happy to listen to it for free on a website, which is fine.
Do you think it’s about offering the consumer more value to try to convince them to buy it instead of just stream it, or listen to it on YouTube, like you mentioned?
I’m not sure how much more value we can add, apart from making a really great record. I think that’s one of the main things; I think with the way that downloads and all that stuff is going on, that might be hurting artists who just have one or two really catchy singles and then the rest of their album’s really crap. But I think a lot of bands - like Gotye, and hopefully us - actually make great records. Or try and make whole records. I think that’s good value. I think the answer is to try to put out a really good product, make a really quality album, not just a couple of great singles and a dodgy record.
Cool. I’m out of questions. Did you want to talk about anything else around this issue?
Since young musicians would be really interested in this article, I would really encourage them to make sure that they’re signed up to APRA because they’re a really great organisation that look after musicians and collect royalties for them. Even if they’re just starting out like we were 15 years ago, we were members of APRA and they collected royalties for us and it might have been a little $5.00 cheque once a month, but still it was something and it made us feel like we were real musicians. I would definitely encourage kids out there to sign up with those guys.
++
Thanks for your time, Julian. For more on this topic, read the article that appeared in triple j mag, or read my interview with Australian hip-hop artist Urthboy on the same topic.
For more of The Presets, visit their website. The music video for their track ‘If I Know You‘ is embedded below.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }