Money in the Music Industry??????

With the all the recent advances in technology, I've been trying to figure out how artist are still making so much money (or at least in their videos they appear to). Well of couse artist like Kayne have multiple endorsement deals that provide nice sums of cash. But as a MUSICIAN, how much of his income really comes from the music he makes?

In high school, I had Kayne's first two ablums, College Dropout and Late Registration, both were burned disc my cousin made for me. As a metter of fact, her were burned as well. So thats about $40 Kanye DID NOT generate from his cd sales. With music being so easy to download these days, theres no reason to go to Target to buy cds anymore. In fact, there no reason to go buy blank cds either, you can download all kinds of music straight to your phone.

Now lets go back for a second and pretend we did downloaded the music legally, from iTunes for example. How much would Kayne actually make since his music would be sold through a third party vendor? I found some interesting information online which claims Apple would get approxiamately 37% percent of an online music sale, the recording company would make about 53% off that sale......and Kanye....10%. Basically he would need to sell 12,399 songs a month to the same as a McDonald's employee. Still want to be a rapper? Thought not.

I do believe artist have recognized there is not that much return on actual music sales and have decided to give their music to their fans for free. There are websites like datpiff.com and hotnewhiphop.com where one can go and download entire mixtapes for free. I believe the artist encourage this because they know their fans will be more likely to listen to it, and anticipate and album they may actually go pay for.

Erin R. 

Source: http://tinyurl.com/99lpoyc