Since I am a creative person, I of course take great interest in how I get paid for my work. While most people consume music and books and such, few people understand how the money works. So, a brief primer:
Much of the way that creative intellectual properties are marketed is to make everything cost the same.
The most obvious example, of course, is Itunes. I haven’t bought anything on Itunes in quite a while, but for the most part, every single song there costs exactly the same as every other song. Granted, you get more money if you sell more copies, but the price per copy of a song is the pretty much the same, whether it’s an Oscar-winning melody with orchestra, or you and your brother on a gutbucket.
When a symphony orchestra plays a piece that is copyrighted, it doesn’t matter whether the composer is Aaron Copland or your next-door neighbor. ASCAP pays the exact same amount of money. (Well, it varies depending on number of musicians and size of hall, but the fame of the composer or the quality of the piece has no bearing on the fee. Everybody gets paid the same.)
Two years ago I discovered a web site that does custom T-shirts and such. The original deal was, they would charge a base fee for an item, and I could charge whatever I wanted to on top of that. However, after doing all the work on that, I received an e-mail from them telling me that they were changing their policy, and everybody was going to get 10% commissions. Everybody gets the same. (I have not done any new designs since. Not worth it.)
There is something similar with a major purveyor of e-books. If you name your own price, okay, you can do that, but then you get 45% of that price . . . but if you accept their preferred policy of selling all e-books for 9.99, you get 70%. Again, these intellectual properties have the same price, and everybody gets the same.
This system of course favors the large distributors and those creators who can achieve economy of scale. If your song, T-shirt design, or book is only of interest to 500 people, you will have to go completely outside the big-name standard channels of Internet commerce to charge more per piece and thereby recoup your investment. It can be done, but one must then shoulder more of the marketing and technical end than perhaps you would like. Good luck.
Also, we will never know what did not get created– or perhaps only available to people with deep pockets– because it couldn’t be monetized within this universal system of everyone getting the same.
© Justin Locke
