It can very, I've made records in one day and I've made records in a year. It's all relative. The Beatles made records in 1 or 2 days, while Michael Jackson took years to make Thriller. If you are in a band it usually takes longer. For example it took the band I'm in (Good Charlotte) around a year to make the last record we put out. Sometimes it takes a while to get the right producers in the studio and we sometimes even have to go back to the drawing board.
What is the percentage of profit you earn from selling your music as opposed to merchandise, concert tickets, etc...?
It used to be more, but I think you want to talk about piracy which has changed everything. The internet has absolutely ruined the music industry. For the last half a decade, it continues to get worse every month, every week, every year. The amount of money we make on record sales is basically zero. Today, its all about tickets and t-shirts, you have to make your rent. The days of not having to tour as much and making a ton of money through sales is irrelevant. That is why all these record labels are all going out of business because they are all being bought out.
In my research I have found that many critics argue that filesharing only hurts the label and not the musicians. In what ways are you directly affected by music piracy?
Well, its an interesting thing because now that the piracy and the whole thing has gone on, we'll play a concert in front of 10,000 kids and we'll go "We don't care how you get our music we just want you to get it" because now we've realized that you just have to get the music out there because that's how you get the heads to the show which gets you to the point of selling tickets and t-shirts, which then we get paid. Record labels, what they didn't do, didn't make their own iTunes. iTunes/Apple came and took it and they monopolized that market in terms of selling music. In my opinion, what the labels should have done was they should have made their own online stores of which to sell music.
Do you buy music?
Oh yeah, even when our last record came out I went to Best Buy and bought like 10 copies of the CD. Everybody in our band does just to support ourselves. Sometimes I'll be on tour and my guitar player will go, "Dude, you gotta check this record out" and he'll just slide it onto my iPod. But then I've gone out and bought records and supported that band. I don't steal music online.
Do you think enough is being done to prevent music piracy?
Obama is trying to pass a law called the SOPA bill. Whether or not that's going to stop the piracy, I don't know, but something needs to be done. The record labels should have protected themselves from the beginning by making their own iTunes or similar music store. I don't know if its going to change. There are a lot of growing pains in that.
If you were to try and convince the public from illegally downloading music, what would you say?
I would say to every person to look at this as an example: just say that your mother or father or whoever works in your family, their work was just cut by 90% monetarily. And they couldn't provide for you, they couldn't provide for them and everything was just being taken for free. Lets just say your father is a doctor. Lets say that something happened and somebody can just go around the corner and get something and that guy just got pushed to the side and it took everything away from him. Business-wise, what would you do? Would you ask your friends to do the right thing? To allow the family to get back to what should be fair, on an ethical level? Just to be fair? It can affect anyone.
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