Can Bowie make a living?

Says here that Moody's Investors Service is thinking about downgrading David Bowie's bond rating. He got a great deal of publicity in 1997 for offering bonds based on future royalties for his music.

I don't know jack about the specific situation with Bowie, so I don't know most of the relevant facts of this particular story, nor do I claim expertise in the bond market. I'm sure Moody's analysts are way ahead of me there.

There's a lot more to a musician's earnings than retail music sales, however. Bowie would have various forms of songwriting income especially that would not be impacted by a slump in retail music sales. This would likely be especially true of an older artist way past his hit making prime. What, is his new album only going to sell 2 copies instead of 3?

For starters, he'll have songwriting royalties based on the airplay of his songs. At this point, I'd suspect this would be several times what he gets from the mechanical songwriting royalties for record sales.

Also, he has money coming in for licensing the songs and the recordings for commercials. I think I've heard "Heroes" in some kind of ad. He could exploit the hell out of the catalog that way. I fully expect to hear his voice in some slamming commercial declaring, "Wham, bam, thank ya ma'am." There is also licensing the songs and recordings for use in movies, which is probably largely legally indistinguishable from licensing them for ads.

Then there is the live arena. Bowie has suggested that in light of the phenomenon of P2P, he suspects that musicians may have to make their living from giving actual live performances, treating studio recordings as advertising. That's probably way overstating the point, but that's not so bad. Many struggling artists in fact make their actual living from playing live- and this experience cannot be downloaded from the internet. Someone of Bowie's stature will be a big money concert draw for as long as he can walk out on a stage, even if he never has another hit.

I wouldn't worry too overly much about musicians making a living, then. There's a lot more to the pie than royalties from the labels for retail music sales- if your artist actually manages to get paid for those.

Article Author: Al Barger

Unreformed hawkish Hoosier hillbilly Al Barger runs the still squeezin' down the psychodelic Kentucky moonshine at More Things. What with the paranoid religious visions, the Pentecostal music, visions of God and anarchy running amok and such, somebody …

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