This is an interesting article on how much money a band whose record goes gold will receive. Before you even read the piece, I'm sure you guess right: that the band doesn't make much money from their album. The record company makes a lot. I understand that this is wrong, and my only beef with the article, and please don't think I'm standing up for the record companies, is that the author starts the piece by saying that only 128 out of 30,000 records go gold. (Let's assume even fewer than 128 go platinum.) So what we have here is that the record companies spend a bunch of money on a lot of bands (29,872) that don't recoup their losses.

The article should have mentioned, even briefly, that the way to solve this is to sign fewer bands. My understanding is that the record companies throw thousands of bands against the wall and see what sticks. Rather, they should get behind fewer bands but ones that are worth the time, effort, and money. Make sense? That's just one example of where further the article could have gone to explain the situation.

All I'm saying is that this article should have said something about how much money the record companies lose each time they release an album. They still suck though.