Truth rings the town bell, someone once said, and in a business where sleaze runs rampant like a Satyr in a brothel, the truths expressed in Confessions seem to be resounding through our community. Since the release of the first edition, readers have sent me in excess of 1000 e-mails with stories that parallel the ones in Confessions. What started out as a subversive alternative to starchy manifestos on the music business has become an established and accepted text in colleges and seminars. Confessions is now quoted by reporters in newspapers and in the press releases of hit-makers; its examples have been used by major stars to leverage their labels into better deals, and passages from its pages have been used in legal briefs to demonstrate “industry standards.”
This is the good news. However, there is some bad. When the publisher requested updates for a new edition, it was my hope that substantial alterations would be necessary due to the raised awareness and the freedoms offered by the Internet. Unfortunately, after looking over each chapter, the only thing that required serious updating was the math to reflect adjustments for inflation and the addition of new scams created by the Internet. (See below). This website is, sadly, still far from obsolete.
When scouring through the pages that deal with budgets for albums, one interesting irony that I noticed is that major label recording budgets have not changed very much at all. In fact, the “downsizing” of the business that occurred in 2003–2005 has created more deals where majors buy pre-recorded masters from previously unsigned artists outright, paying mere pennies for finished records. Meanwhile, the price of CDs has increased about 20% since Confessions’ first printing. This means that labels have succeeded in widening the spread between their development costs and bottom-line profits, while artists’ representation has failed to keep pace and capture some of this revenue. To add insult to injury, labels and publishers are now collecting money from new revenue streams created by ring tones, webcasting, downloads, and streaming. Evidence suggests that little of this new money is, as yet, being passed on to the artist in any consistent way.
Let’s hope that by the fourth edition of Confessions, the content creators of our industry can learn enough to regain some ground. That is the goal of this website.