Quote:
Originally Posted by lefty12357
...artist must waive his or her rights to any audit of the record company's books, so there is no way to know if a proper accounting was done on those expenses.
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Hollywood accounting, LOL.
An important point about the chart I just reproduced above is that when the Corsican fairy entered showbiz, the industry had no trouble selling LOTS of CDs, and they grossed four or five times as much as they could by 2009. So an album which now sells "only" 20,000 units should hardly be judged as harshly as one which had such sales at the turn of the century. So to speak, it is what we only recently called a 100,000-seller - at least under the assumption of constant title-creation velocity.
I think the loss of musical recording sales is due not only to the trivial ease of piracy, but also to the vast and ever-increasing supply of cultural and entertainment material which is
legitimately available for free, or all-but-free. This is because technology has "manumitted" out-of-copyright matter (
cf. Google Books), and artists of all kinds must now give away so much of their copyright-protected produce in order to be
visible amidst the ever-growing cacophony.
Live performance revenues to musical performing artists are actually
growing, but much of this may be going to top-tier stars doing mega-concerts. And of course, it is hardly a secret that live performance is by far the
most expensive method to deliver entertainment.
Again, I see the
upgraded neighborhood film theater as the vehicle to enable a
distributed live performance venue which second-tier artists will be able to exploit. It offers the tempting possibility of high-production-value shows, without the expense of repeated travel and setup by artists and excessive travel by attendees, while retaining the physical intimacy of attendees, the possibility of interactivity with the performers, and the security against media piracy due to sequestration.