I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know?
At the end of the day, a playback singer has to depend on live shows as their source of income.
I think the music business is changing. Artists that don't want to tour and just want to collect royalty checks and stay home are not going to be able to do that.
Well, a lot of our concerts do okay, and I know we still get royalty checks which still isn't that important, but again, I have to just say that we're making our records.
Rappers aren't the really rich ones. We all have nice houses with studios and cars, but you need a piece of someone's business to be super wealthy.
It's a strange position to be in. Not only the fact that I'm trying to live off work that is personal, but how you get the money for that is racing around the country and smiling for people and selling the record, you know what I mean?
I've never made a dime from a record sale in the history of my record deal. I've been very happy with my sales, and certainly my audience has been very supportive. I make a living going out and playing shows.
I am a commercial artist because I paint to earn a living. We who earn money from what we produce are all commercial artists.
When I was releasing EPs by myself, I was generating royalties. And when I signed, I thought I'd put those royalties into other artists. And interestingly, streaming is most of the income for those artists.
Yeah, if someone's selling downloads and collecting money for our songs I would be unhappy about that but if they're trading it I don't mind, obviously if I make a thousand records or CDs or whatever, I like to sell a thousand.
If I had to live on record sales, I'd be pushing up the daisies.
If I cut an album now and sell it for ten bucks, I can put seven dollars and fifty cents in my pocket.
These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.
You see the music videos and the bling and the cars, but all of that goes home at the end of the shoot. They make nothing because there's less and less money in the music industry.
With Spotify and all those streaming services, you don't get paid anything. You have to be, like, Madonna or something to actually make a real royalty from that.
But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
Money's really - you know, song writing, yes, there's money to be made and things like that. But really, when you talk about the real money, you talk about touring. No question.
Profile has half the publishing and they control and administer the publishing and distribute and own the records, so our group is a 10-point crew. But we got a lot of money off of the shows.
Because of piracy there has been a massive downturn in people buying music, which makes it more difficult for artists to make money from the sale of records.
Fortunately, artists can live off their works, if you're creative at how you do it. If you just depend on the videos and the radio, you're at a loss.
You don't make any money being an artist. Writing and producing? You get your money from that. You live comfortable.
It's not that you don't make any money doing conscious rap music. You make a lot of money doing this, but if you're greedy and you're not satisfied with $500,000 a year, and you want $2 million a year, then you will suffer as a conscious rap artist.
You don't sell as many records as you used to because of illegal downloads, but I think there are other ways you can make money through your music. Whether it's through merchandise or teaming up with other companies or brands or whatever, there are ways.
I make my money off of touring and merchandise. And I'm lucky I have really loyal fans that understand how it works and support.
