I did a google search this afternoon to get some information for the CD I'll be releasing shortly. I wanted to find out how a small label like mine can pay royalties to songwriters and publishers for songs my band has recorded without being raped by companies like Harry Fox Agency, which wants me to pay up front for how many times I guess my album will be digitally downloaded this year plus a $15 fee per song on top of that.

So, for example, if I say I think I'll sell 50 downloads of the album x 10 songs written by other artists x 10 cents per song, that comes to $50 worth of royalties. Reasonable enough.

But then Harry Fox adds a $150 service fee (10 x $15), which seems odd to me. This company would earn 3 times as much as all the songwriters and publishers combined just for collecting and distributing the cash?

Looking for clues to a more equitable way to do this, I typed "royalty reporting for very small label" into the Google, and the very first entry that came up was this one written last December on the band Too Much Joy's blog titled My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement.

The title of course, is sarcastic. The story is not funny. The article details some of the standard business practices of the big bad record companies and how they have routinely screwed the poor little musicians. Various aspects of this story have been documented and explained time and again, but I think the sheer brazenness on the human level of how this artist is treated by record company accountants is worth looking at.

And it gives me pause. Here I am worrying about paying ten cents per download to each artist that writes a song. If I sell 300 copies of my album, which I'm planning to distribute digitally for $3.99 a piece (for 16 songs) I expect I'll be overjoyed!

Yet the Warner Brothers accountant was crass enough to tell the pesky musician that a $10,000 accounting error (in the record company's favor, of course) was simply of no account. It happens all the time.

That kind of dinosaur thinking is doomed to fail. It's the kind of thinking that pumps oil from the bottom of the ocean with minimal safeguards, leading to disaster. But us little mammals can't be discouraged. We've got important woik to do!