Aging Rockers sue Sony over downloads
Found on The Inquirer on Sunday, 30 April 2006
Veteran rock stars Cheap Trick and The Allman Brothers Band are suing Sony Music over the amount of money they get for legal downloads.
The bands claim that Sony has promised that half of net revenue it receives from from licensing songs to download services like iTunes and Napster will go to them.
Sony is taking this cash out of the final total. At the moment if you download a track for a dollar, 70 cents of that will go to the record label and four cents will go to the artists. The bands think they should be getting 30 cents.
The bands want to make the case a class action which will cover all Sony artists who signed deals between 1962 and 2002.
Four cents. Four percent only. No wonder some artists say that filesharing hurts them. But it's not P2P, but the recording industry who screws them over royally. It should be the artists who get 70%; after all, they create the music. Good luck with their lawsuit.