How Best To Support Your Favorite Artist

I download tons of free music, most of which is given away by the artists in an effort to promote, but when it comes to artists that I love I go out of my way to support them.  Sometimes I do that through attending a show, but most often its by buying their music. A lot of times that's through Amazon's MP3 store, although every now and again you can get the physical CDs for less than the download for some older albums.  I also like to support my local music shop and you should too. There's nothing wrong with helping a local business keep the lights on if he or she is running a cool establishment.  The following is an excerpt from an NPR article and their show All Things Considered on the best way to get the highest percentage of your consumer dollar to the artist you support.

Streaming

Often today, you don't have to pay anything to listen to a new album, and sometimes you can even do it without breaking the law. Between sites like Youtube, which host non-sanctioned user-uploaded streams; Rdio, where you pay a subscription fee to have access to a selection of cloud-based streaming albums; and sites like NPR Music (hi, guys!), where streams of many full albums are available for limited amounts of time, you can listen to an album without paying a dime.

So it doesn't count as a purchase, but that doesn't mean the musicians walk away from the exchange empty-handed. These websites pay for the right to broadcast that music (as do radio stations), often in tiny amounts per song/per listener, to organizations like SoundExchange, which in turn pay royalty rates to the musicians. According to a 2009 settlement between the National Association of Broadcasters and SoundExchange, that royalty rate for 2011 is $0.0017 per song.

More money (still in tiny increments that, in the best-case scenario, accrue over time) goes to the songwriter(s) whose work is streamed, via organizations like ASCAP and BMI, but the specific amount of money that songwriter receives is a percentage of the licensing fees paid by the streaming site in proportion to how often her song is performed, and how many people were listening.

Digital Music Stores

"On the digital side, most people tend to make between 60 and 75 cents [per song] for a sale off of iTunes," Barger says. "That money doesn't all flow back to the band, but that's generally what the label earns from iTunes."

Why the range in wholesale price? Barger says that unlike physical distribution, contracts with digital stores are negotiated separately by each label. And from there, it's kind of impossible to know just how much money a band will get if you buy their album via an a la carte (as opposed to subscription) download service, because the each band's contract with its label is different, and renegotiated every year or two. The two parties might split the revenues 50/50, or the musicians might get a percentage of each sale.

Brick And Mortar Record Stores

So you've made the choice to leave your house, walk into a physical record store and use your dollars to vote for a band. How much money does your effort buy? Not necessarily much more than what that band might get from the sale of a digital album.

To get albums into record stores, most labels partner with distributors. Bob Morelli, the President of RED Music, an independent distributor owned by Sony Music, describes the relationship between a distributors and a store as similar to the one between a label and a musician. Each album has a set wholesale price – somewhere between five and seven dollars, according to Dawn Barger – that each and every store that wants to stock the album will pay (as with digital sales, the musicians get a portion of that wholesale price that depends on their contract with the label). The distributor's job is to figure out which stores the album will sell in, and then to convince as many of those stores as it can to stock it, to make it "as ubiquitous as possible," Morelli says.

In order to achieve that ubiquity, some records bring in a little less money.

"If you have a discounted album in a physical retail setting, generally, not always but generally, the record label has paid for that," Barger says. "Price and positioning, listening stations, weekly circulars — all of these things can be charged back to the record label to position the record better in the store."

Sometimes those discounts trade in higher sales for a lower per-album return to the band. When the National's last album, 2010's High Violet, came out, the band's label paid more for placement than it had with the band's previous album, 2008's Boxer. Nearly a year later, even though sales for High Violet are stronger, Barger says, "At this point in the album cycle, we've actually earned more per album from Boxer than we have from High Violet, due to the spend over time."

Directly From The Band

While the many layers of complex contracts, discounts and placement programs can make it tough to know exactly how much of your dollar a band gets from a retail outlet, there's one reassuring certainty. When you buy your album directly from the band, it actually sees significantly more money.

That's because in this scenario – say, when you buy it from a band at a show – the musicians function as the retail store. Which means they pay the wholesale cost for the album, and you pay the retail to them. "So they're purchasing from the label and the money that goes back to the label is paid back to them in their royalty share," Barger explains. "But all of the markup that would normally go to the retail store goes to the band when you purchase it at a show."

Even if you subtract a fee from the venue, that can mean an extra five or six dollars per sale. Which can add up.

Plus, there's a bonus. The San Francisco-based musician John Vanderslice calls sales via digital or brick and mortar outlets "essential" but "unknowable transaction[s] to me." Handing over a copy of an LP to a fan at a show, though, is his favorite "It's a totally exciting and very pure thrill that will never die with me. Like half of the fun of playing a live show for me is going to the merch table and talking to people and signing stuff. ... It feels really great to hand-deliver that to a fan."

Info spotted at The Record.