Outfit pockets cash for things like packaging
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.
However, Sony seems to have them by the short and curlies because when the bands signed their contracts, it was long before the days of MP3s and filesharing, so their contracts include references to charges like packaging, loses due to breakages and restocking costs.
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. More at
Forbes,
here.