How Labels Shaft Musicians - 2. The Hidden Costs

There are an alarming number of ways that record labels manage to bleed extra money from their clients. In a lot of cases these are charges that you and I would generally believe to be acceptable costs that the label themselves should pay. A prime example is "secretly" paying independent promoters to promote the single or album. They usually do this by paying radio stations to play the music. Record labels claim to do this in order that the radio stations don’t know they’re being paid by the label. You might believe this would fall under the remit of the label, as being part of the marketing costs. However, in many contracts, deep down in the incredibly small print, you will usually find that the label would rather the band paid for it. Once the contract is signed, of course, there is nothing that can be done. The most difficult part of this for musicians to bear is that the independent promoter is not as affordable as his name would suggest. The cost of this little transaction can easily be in the range of $500,000 or possibly even more. There is no guarantee that the independent promoter has a positive effect or that it is even they who get the record played on the radio. The band also has no say in whether it goes ahead or not. The ist on signing a contract with a large label then do read every last letter of the fine print. If possible get a solicitor to look it over to be sure that you aren’t signing away your unborn children.