Photo: Adobe Stock/Luaeva
Back during the recording industries salad days—pre-Napster, pre-streaming—when LPs and CDs were still king of the hill, label companies routinely screwed recording artists out of their royalties from album sales. Dorothy Carvello in her recent tell-all book, Anything for a Hit, reveals how one major label, Atlantic, scammed its musician roster and, by implication, how the other big labels did as well. [1]
Under the guise of the so-called “free goods” clause in their artist contracts, the royalty thieves conducted their dirty business in broad daylight using three methods.
1. CUTOUTS
For those who remember LP jackets with sliced corners—cutouts—found in bargain bins probably never gave a thought as to how they got there. Well, when a label had an album with weak sales performance, they would cut a corner off the album covers or punch a hole in them and give the unsold albums to an intermediary for pennies on the dollar, who would then sell them to retailers.
In turn, the stores would sell them at a discount (relative to list price) and give a percentage to the label, who would pocket the money (sans store share, of course)—but nothing to the artist.
2. OVERRUNS
When the pressing plant pressed more LP jackets or CD plastic covers than records, the label would order more vinyl or disc plastic to slip into the jacket or box. As before, overruns went to the bargain bins.
And guess who pocketed the money? In this instance, however, these were top sellers by big name artists, not low-selling flop remainders. Much, much more lucrative, and the artists didn’t get a dime.
3. CLEANS
According to Carvello, the worst offense was selling “cleans,” albums meant strictly for promotional purposes and often so designated. The promotional cleans were capped by a certain number per the artist contract.
But labels pressed a lot more—who’s to know how many—and funneled them to retailers who sold them at full price. All parties (label, distributor, retailer) got their share except the artists—again, no royalties. [2]
With the above in mind, what is the royalty situation today for artists, where some 85 percent of industry sales are by digital downloads of one sort or another, paid streaming subscriptions being the largest component of the total at 47 percent? [3]
If anyone knows, please let me know.
CODA
Ms. Carvello’s book is a frank, insider account of the music biz in the late 1980s to early 2000s. She was the first female A&R executive at Atlantic Records and one of the first at RCA and Columbia. Based on her book, many music business executives of the time were totally oblivious to the woman’s movement that began in the late 1960s and its demands for respectful treatment in the workplace.
Absent a #MeToo movement, Ms. Carvello nonetheless survived to tell the tale and set a path forward for women to contribute to the music industry.
- Dorothy Carvello, Anything for a Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music industry (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018).
- Ibid., 57–59.
- “The Story of the Music Industry in One Chart,” Rolling Stone, July 2018. See my take on this article here.
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