[LINK] How the big music companies take music royalties for themselves

[Paul Bolger]

It has occurred to me that there is a need for a digital 'honesty jar'
- a method for paying artists directly for music which one obtains via
bit torrent or other non record company sanctioned means. As well as
making the consumer feel good it would be a powerful argument if one
were ever singled out by the copyright police: "Well, actually, I paid
them directly."


The question is: what is a fair price for a track? How much would one
have to pay to exceed what the artist would have got from selling a
recording of a song via the conventional means? We know that Apple
sell songs for US$.99, and that they take 30% of that. Presumably the
record companies take at least half of the remaining 66c. What does
the band actually get?