p2p feature / p2pnet: It was a couple of months ago now (April I think) when I happen to catch the opening sequence to the Australian Idol show – I think it was called Off The Record – aired on Australia’s Network 10. As I quickly reached for the remote to change stations, I noted the commentator bragging about the past idols “and together they have sold more than 4 million CDs” and then came the invitation:

“You do the math!”

“Do the math,” I thought to myself and silently scoffed and thought, “Yeah, they’ve probably made about 4 cents from their CD sales.”

Anyway, I didn’t think much more about it. What do I care about the Australian Idiots? OK, maybe I voted a couple of times for Casey Donovan in season 2 – nothing to do with intending to buy her CD, more a girl power thing: wanting to see a young, less than marketable girl, get up over her plastic fantastic competition. The only reason I really watched it in the past was to have something to laugh about with my friends.

Then at the end of May I had to do a presentation for my Law School – part of the probation requirements for my thesis candidature and while this went well, in the days afterwards I was reflecting on what I could’ve done better.

Writing a thesis on file sharing/copyright law necessarily includes an examination of the benefits (or lack there of) of copyright to artists and in my talk I had spoken extensively about (based on American research – partly Professor William Fisher’s Promises to Keep) how 90-95% of artists never receive royalties from CD sales and how the average American artist needs to sell around 1 million CDs to receive royalties, by which time the record label has recouped something like $11 million in gross revenue. I decided I needed more information on Australian record contracts, so I decided to take up the challenge: I would do the math!

The implication from the show was that the Idols were making money from their CD sales. I don’t dispute that they have made money; from concerts, interviews, commercial uses of their songs, merchandising etc, but the implication here was clear: they were making money from their CD sales.

I started to think about it: if the average US artist needs to sell one million CDs and Oz Idol had spawned around 10 recording artists with varying success; if the majority of the Oz Idol releases were covers and they were therefore not getting publishing royalties; if the majority of their releases were singles pushing down the royalty rate, on the face of it, the assertion was looking dodgy at best. But then, on the other hand, some of the initial promotional costs would have been absorbed by the TV show, and I think most of the recordings were done in Australia and in short periods of time suggesting lower than average studio costs…

So I started with the Australian Idol web site. Surely there’d be terms and conditions about entering the competition that might shed some light on the deal with SonyBMG?. Nope. Nothing. So I did a key word search for Australian Idol and came up with a wikipedia page outlining their ’success’. This gave a fairly good indication of the number of CDs they’d sold, but now I needed a royalty rate.

There’s a wealth of information on the net, including this recent article from The Musicians Union of Australia about how record label contracts are so unfair, and one from 2004 on the same topic, but the best I could do in terms of a royalty rate was a 2003 ABC article suggesting that the average Australian artist needs to sell 2.5 x platinum, or 175,000 CDs to earn royalties. Presumably this refers to full CDs not singles.

So on the basis of the information I have:

• There have been 14 Oz Idols that have released full CDs; plus 3 group CDs making a total of 17 artists or groups of artists.
• In total they have released 21 full CDs.
• Together they have sold around 1,750,000 copies (where platinum sales = 70,000 units and gold sales = 35,000 units).
• On an over all average therefore each artist/group of artists has sold 102,941 copies – clearly not reaching the 175,000 threshold.
• The average number of copies sold for each CD are around 83,333.
• There have been only 3 out of 21 Oz Idol CDs that sold over 175,000 units – clearly not a majority.

But what of singles?

Well, as much as I looked, I couldn’t find anything online that could give me an indication, and short of lining up for hours and hours at the next audition to see what the terms and conditions were of the competition, I was at a loss as to how I would find this out. What I was concerned about here was the suggestion that these artists were getting rich from CD sales, unlikely from where I’m sitting. So would this be misleading and deceptive conduct in the course of trade or commerce? There was only one place to turn – the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).

I called the ACCC and explained what I was interested in and asked what they thought, they said that the only way they could look into it would be if I made a complaint. The problem is that, first, the ACCC are seriously under resourced and there’s a less than good chance they will investigate, and even if Sony BMG did cough up the details to them they wouldn’t pass them on to me.

So here it is: a public call to Sony BMG/Australian Idol/Network 10:

Do you want me to do the math? Or do you just want to mislead the Australian public?

I call on you to publicly release details of how much these artists have made in royalties – after they have recouped their costs.

If you have nothing to hide: SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Sally Hawkins – p2pnet, Australia
[Hawkins is a former musician and songwriter who decided to study law after doing a course in Music Business Management in 1991; she's worked for various departments in both Federal and State Australian Government, holds a Bachelors Degree in Legal and Justice Studies (Criminal Law), a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and is currently a postgraduate student with Southern Cross University writing a thesis on Copyright Law/P2P File Sharing.]

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