Katy Perry

On the top 40, Katy Perry has made a record for being number one five times off one album since Michale Jackson's record. Katy Perry now is the perfect experiment for an economist, if you cant make money off of her then you are in bad shape basically. A question that was asked to the record label was if they had made a profit and there response was, " I believe so, yes". the reason why the record label answered like this was because for 1. the record industry is very secretive, 2. because its complicated on how these records are making money off a superstar like that.

Katy Perry sold 2 million albums and 204 million individual songs. So on iTunes at 99 cents a song if you do the math that's 44 million dollars in songs made. But what i learned from this podcast was that not all the money goes to the record label. Apple takes about 30% of the 99 cents from the song, 15% goes to the royalty of Katy Perry, and 30 cents goes to the song writers. So the record label is left with 25 cents on the dollar from the 99 cent song. The EMI invested alot of money to make a good record if you think about it.

There are two expenses that people need to worry about in making a record. The first one is the album itself and how much did it cost to record teenage dream for instance. Well from the pod casts research they found out that it took 1.5 million up to 2 million dollars to make the song. The reason why this song was so expensive was because for one Snoop Dog was in the song and hes pricey and second the production. Another expense is the radio. A hit song is not a hit song until the radio. 92.3 said that they play Katy Perry's song up to 19 times a day. The labels spend a lot of money on independent promoters who are the people who sell the songs to the radios.

The problem with this is that Katy Perry is a huge hit and the record label only made 8 million off of her. The reason why they didn't make that much is because this whole summer Katy Perry toured all summer and the record label doesn't get any of that money, also when the song plays 19 times on the raido the record label doesn't get any of that money either. The profit of an Artist has record sales, publishing, and touring revenue, and merchandise revenue. But with today's internet its the opposite revenue structure.

The label record came up with a deal called the 360 deal which is how to get a piece of all these record deals basically a little piece of everything the artist does. Music sales is the least significant of what the record labels do.

This podcast made me look at Katy Perry differently from what i heard. In the podcast they said that she probably has a good lawyer and that's why she didn't agree to the 360 deal because she didn't want to split up her money. Another thing that i didn't like was when they said that she doesn't even really write her lyrics, she has a song writer.

The three major music labels that are left are 1. Universal music group 2. Warner and 3. Sony which should be known as promotional conglomerates around artists.