The US government says that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom masterminded a vast file sharing conspiracy that swindled the entertainment industry out of millions by letting users illegally download movies and songs.
But here’s what the current ‘deal’ is according to the pimps and thieves of the entertainment-industrial complex, and that’s the way these racketeers, who led and consorted with the DOJ to accuse megaupload of ‘racketeering’, want to keep it.
Even with hard copies of compact discs, the artists’ royalties rarely add up to 20 percent of the revenue made.
Dotcom wanted to more than quadruple that by offering artists 90 cents for every dollar spent on downloading songs and even compensate them for tunes acquired for free. In a press release from last year, Dotcom even acknowledged that, “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads.”
Such an attitude is often absent from the music industry insiders, though. As a result, many hopes of a career in the biz have been broken after realizing that the rock and roll lifestyle isn’t oh-so obtainable. “To get to the nuts and bolts of things, unless you’re Rihanna or something, you don’t really make money from record sales anymore,” Mickey Melchiondo of Ween told USA Today last summer.
Over the course of more than two decades, Ween released more than a dozen albums and toured internationally several times over, but the guitarist says that royalties are rare. ”I don’t have sympathy for the record companies,” Melchiondo told the New York Times in 2003. ”They haven’t been paying me royalties anyway.”
After a slew of releases on the major labels, the band began recording and releasing albums on their own.
H/t:rtamerica
