Is money the most important thing?

My original question was to try and find out how record companies determine the best type of music to use to make the most money.  Throughout my research I found that they sign all sorts of artists and genres in order to do this so I created another question to keep my research going which is how do record companies make their money so i could learn more about the process of what they do.  I found that they really do take a gamble when signing those artists, but they also rip off the artists and take away all of their artistic freedom.

Through the article "How Record Labels Really Make Their Money" I found that record labels really take a risk on who they sign when signing an actual artist and that they really rip off the artists because of this.  They make the majority of the money when an album or even a song sells because of how much of a risk they are taking by signing a new and upcoming artist.

According to the article “How Record Labels Invest” by the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry), spend somewhere between $500,000-$2,000,000 in order to sign an artist and give them all the benefits that they get with a signing (these statistics are based on major record labels not independent record labels).  This money is spent on many things like advances, recording costs, video production, tour support, and marketing/promotion. This is an add on to the last article where it goes in depth on how much money is actually being spent on each artist and it’s an alarming amount and I never thought it would be this much.  in my opinion it kind of explains why they rip the artists off so much with all of their rules.

In the article called “Record Contracts Explained by Richard Salmon he explains how the record contracts work and how lenient they are with all of their legal binds when offering a contract to a certain artists.  It explains that because of how much money and how much of a risk the record companies are putting into these artists that they create many rules that the artists have to follow like they can’t go to any other label to record a song or even be featured on another artist’s album without their permission which makes sense, but still seems a little over the top with certain things.

According to the article “Independent or contract: Do musicians still need record labels like Young Money and Sony?” by Alicia Adejobe many artists are starting to become independent with the help of all teenagers favorite thing, social media.  In this article it talks about how many artists are becoming independent so they don’t have to r=follow all of the rules that the record companies impose on them.  They are then using social media to promote their music and tours because they don’t have the record companies to help them.  Because of this though the record companies are becoming more lenient and signing different contracts where they will be more in the promoting and tour aspect of it and back up the artists as opposed to them actually controlling them.

Overall I found that record companies really make their money by ripping off the artists and controlling their artistic careers.  But through the new age of technology with social media and streaming services more famous artists are becoming solo artists or independent artists in order to make the most of their careers.  For the first time in the modern music era artists seem to have the upper hand especially the new artists because they have many services to start their careers and record companies will soon have to change if they want to be a major factor in artists careers and be the big super powers that they used to be in the music business in order to make the most money possible.