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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

"TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING."

I'm guessing that's only because her advance was greater than her royalties so far, so she really did make money off of those sales. Probably much more than $19,000 too.

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Its actually probably because the cost of making and distributing an album like hers is pretty high. Shes probably just not even close to breaking even on the costs she owes the record label.

The fact that it was ben folds produced leads me to believe that it probably cost quite a bit.

So shes right, shes probably made nothing and is in fact probably still in the hole.

Any clue on what the [edit] solo album advance might have been? I think advances range over two orders of magnitude or more, don't they?

Well, a close friend of mine helms a moderately well-known metal band (albums charted in Germany, high on the UK Rock Charts and on the Billboard Heatseeker charts in the US) and after two successful albums, a few large European tours and a month touring the US (in itself a big feat for a European metal band), they are still 'down' by a figure in the order of tens of thousands of GBP to their record label. It's definitely a tough game.

Sounds like bullet.

See, the thing is, if they're only down by tens of thousands of £, which is like dozens of thousands of US$, they would earn out from that in short order if the album revenues were similar to their merchandise revenues Palmer cites here.

Advances run from 10k to millions, depending on how many albums the music executives believe you will sell, and how badly they want to distribute your album.

I know more about the book publishing industry than the music one, but I'd guess that to get million dollar advances you'd have to be a band with a track record, or at least one in a bidding war between labels.

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