Since the beginning and for most of time, musicians have made money by playing music. Profits from recordings were a blink of the eye in the history of musicians and most musicians on records never got residuals.

When we were being courted by Motown, our lawyers and manager figured out how much we would make at Motown's final offer of 2 cents per record. By the time we paid Motown's inflated recording costs, inflated promotional costs, and inflated distribution costs, we would have to sell at least a million records to break even. (The costs were to come out of our royalties.) And in the late 1960s a million record sales was not common.

Motown wanted songwriter and publisher rights for themselves. They said they might give us partial songwriting credits if they felt our contribution was big enough (in other words, dream on).

That's why so many one-hit or few hit wonders ended up playing in bars again.

Now if the record did the equivalent of today's term 'going viral', and you sold a few million on your first release, you could negotiate a better deal for the next one. If not, the second one would be paid for you in advance and it would not get promoted. At least that was what the manager and lawyers relayed to us.

So the Studio musicians at the Wrecking Crew, Muscle Shoals, Stax and other magic places were probably making more money than most of the stars they were recording the background music for.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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