Martin Orford August 2009

sorry, I must have missed your question.  The problem with eMusic or any "all you can eat" type of service is you pay a low flat rate for virtually unlimited access and that gets split up with every artist you purchased from.  The first time I saw a digital says report with payments of even less than 1 penny, so of course it is rounded down and you get nothing, they seem to play a trick where they do the rounding on individual sales instead of all your sales, so say you had a cumulative $10 in profits, you'd get nothing because they were all a fraction of a cent.  Part of this applies to places like MySpace that monetize your songs that are playing by having ads on your page, but you have NO control over what they do.  I had them override my 2 minute song sample with the entire song, I can't change it and I don't want the entire song on there, my only option is to opt out entirely.

Services like my Mindawn pay a 75% royalty, this is to whoever put the material up, the artist or the label, obviously the more middlemen you have, the less you get.  Take iTunes as an example, you have an artist, the label, a propogator and then iTunes, everyone is getting their piece of it, so the artist doesn't see a whole lot, however there usually aren't expenses to recoup from it, so it's nearly free money.

Why do people end up on eMusic?  Because the sign up with a propagator and don't pay attention to the details.  I'm pretty certain those types of services will go away as more people notice.