Thanks to hypebot, i found  this remarkable post from Umair Haque on Harvard Business Blogs. He calculates MJ’s royalty income to $12M per year, which is a lot of money, but astoundingly low considering MJs outstanding fame:

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels’ pockets.

Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that’s how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

It’s not the web that is responsible for the current desaster of music economy, it is the greed of those who conducted all this. The music industry deserves to disappear.

I’m not skilled to judge the quality of music. What does quality in art mean anyway? The sex pistols, did they make “good” music in the sense of a musician? Surely not. Have the been “good” musicians? *cough*. Was punk rock innovative? nope, it was just rock’n'roll, not even a fast one. So why have the sex pistols – at least – been so successful and why did millions identify with their music and why can be said: this is true art? Of course is the answer: because punk rock was an authentic, urgent and strong expression of an attitude towards society and life.

Authenticity is something that everybody carries inside, it derives from life itself, it is not manageable and cannot be created artificially. Authenticity is the key to art. I am convinced that the greatest and most common mistake in the music business is to influence and polish artists in order to reach marketing goals and therefore undermine and bury their authenticity. This is the true reason for the current disaster of the music industry.

Regina Spektor says: Don’t mess with art!

There is the suggestion that an album should cost $5, my guess is that in mid term the prices will even drop to around $3. This seems to be the amount a consumer is willing to pay on a voluntary basis. (Remember the Radiohead In Rainbows numbers. Divide $2,736,000 by 1,200,000 downloads, then you get $2.28 in average.)

Why so low? It’s not only random customer behaviour. The value of an mp3 file itself, as is with any digital information, tends to zero. It’s an economic fact, because the marginal costs for the production of a digital copy are nearly zero.

Despite this a digital download has a value for the customer, because of two reasons:

First, the service that provides the download is a value. If you pay, you save yourself hunting in file sharing networks and ending up with mistagged mp3s in bad quality. The better the service, the higher the value. iTunes is more convenient than amazon’s mp3 store, so they might be able to realize a higher price.

Second, people will pay because it’s fair. But you are not paying for the file, your want to support the artist. People (mostly) want to be fair. In this view, you are paying for the consumer-artist relationship. This means that probably a direct sale from the band’s website has a higher value for the customer – if they know that the money goes directly to the artist – that could equal much more than $3.

What I love about “Elephants … Teeth Sinking Into Heart” is you know for a fact that there was not a single A&R or P.R. or marketing person that was in the process remotely, because there’s not a single up-tempo song on the whole album. They’re all completely self-indulgent, in the best possible sense of the word, indulging in the beauty of the sadness.

I’m so thrilled when I hear that. There might be slight danger that a label would be trying to say “Let’s make sure there’s a radio song.” It’s a really healthy thing in this younger generation of artists…

No A&R, no PR and marketing remotely makes good music. Just think about it.

The new service will launch at music.myspace.com but will look completely different than the existing site. Users will be able to stream music for free, create playlists, download music from Amazon, buy merchandise and event tickets, and buy ringtones.

I love it. Thanks for the link, Matt.