squarepusher Are Luke (or afx or squarepusher) employed?

[Guest Vlue]

Or do they make their living only through their music? what do they get their income from?

[perunamuusi]

£20,000 per hour for playing mp3s in Traktor at a room full of people

[Guest Otto Krat]

£20,000 per hour for playing mp3s in Traktor at a room full of people

 

But they do it good.

[Guest Vlue]

£20,000 per hour for playing mp3s in Traktor at a room full of people

 

where are you getting this information from?..

[Silent Member]

aphex twins

[Guest Otto Krat]

£20,000 per hour for playing mp3s in Traktor at a room full of people

 

where are you getting this information from?..

 

Lol. Shows, pictures. Luke and afx uses Traktor. As for the squarepusher, it's a little bit more complicated.

[Guest Vlue]

£20,000 per hour for playing mp3s in Traktor at a room full of people

 

where are you getting this information from?..

 

Lol. Shows, pictures. Luke and afx uses Traktor. As for the squarepusher, it's a little bit more complicated.

 

 

Well yeah. But I'm wondering if they make their living only off of live shows/records, or if they have other sources of income. £20,000 sounds a bit much for an hour...

[Guest Helper ET]

i bet they made a decent income for a few years in their heyday, then invested it in stocks and bonds, and retired in their 30s

 

lets do the math

 

so lets say windowlicker sold 10 000 copies at around $15 a record. well thats $150 000 that warp/rdj received, just on record sales alone. thats not taking into account live performances, tv commercials, video games, and MTV. if you know how to invest properly, its not that hard to turn $150 000 - $250 000 into a million in just a couple years. you can do it even quicker if youve done your homework. then once you have your million, you can double or triple that again in a relatively short amount of time

 

and thats only if he sold 10 000 windowlickers. it was probably more. didnt come to daddy sell like crazy too? then youve got rdj album, 26 mixes, druqks, analords, cho$en lord$, the tuss, and all the little afx fannies going out to buy up all his old releases. the total amount of record sales between all these has got to be at least one or two hundred thousand, if not more.

 

then once he has built up all the notoriety, he simply has to grace a festival with his presence for a quick DJ set and receive probably shameful amounts. and then he could invest again to just cum stupid hard

 

...planet AFX...

[Joyrex]

i bet they made a decent income for a few years in their heyday, then invested it in stocks and bonds, and retired in their 30s

 

lets do the math

 

so lets say windowlicker sold 10 000 copies at around $15 a record. well thats $150 000 that warp/rdj received, just on record sales alone. thats not taking into account live performances, tv commercials, video games, and MTV. if you know how to invest properly, its not that hard to turn $150 000 - $250 000 into a million in just a couple years. you can do it even quicker if youve done your homework. then once you have your million, you can double or triple that again in a relatively short amount of time

 

and thats only if he sold 10 000 windowlickers. it was probably more. didnt come to daddy sell like crazy too? then youve got rdj album, 26 mixes, druqks, analords, cho$en lord$, the tuss, and all the little afx fannies going out to buy up all his old releases. the total amount of record sales between all these has got to be at least one or two hundred thousand, if not more.

 

then once he has built up all the notoriety, he simply has to grace a festival with his presence for a quick DJ set and receive probably shameful amounts. and then he could invest again to just cum stupid hard

 

...planet AFX...

 

WARP/Richard were paid a 90,000USD advance for the album that was supposed to follow Windowlicker, and I guarantee you Windowlicker/CTD sold in excess of 10K units EACH in the US alone.

 

Also, Richard was paid handsomely for his remix and licensing of his work, most notably for the Pirelli advertisement.

[cern]

Richard is self employed

[patternoverlap]

£20,000 per hour for playing mp3s in Traktor at a room full of people

 

I imagine if he plays a handful of live gigs/dj sets a year, even at £20,000 each, he can live pretty well. Why work?

[perunamuusi]

that £20k figure was purely speculative and loosely based on how much i would pay Aphex to smell his bumhole while i do a wankoff.

[Velazquez]

Let's put it this way, drinks are on Ol' Rich next time we hang.

[Guest Vlue]

Okay, but how about Luke Vibert though?

 

Squarepusher?

[awesomeperson]

Luke Vibert works at an italian pizzeria.

 

BoC are postal workers in the country-side, all mail is delivered on 1970 bicycles.

 

Squarepusher is a carpenter, this is what gives him strength to his fingers to play the electric bass guitar like a maniac.

[Guest chax]

unless someone makes it to 'superstar' status through a combination of years worth of hard work and luck, the majority of producers either have normal jobs or other ways of achieving a stable income. it's not something that is talked about a lot because everyone wants to live off solely from their music but it's just not realistic for the majority of people. there are a lot of statistics about this kind of thing, i think i read somewhere that you have better odds at being a professional athlete than being successful as a musician. oh well

[Guest mafted]

Luke Vibert works at an italian pizzeria.

 

BoC are postal workers in the country-side, all mail is delivered on 1970 bicycles.

 

Squarepusher is a carpenter, this is what gives him strength to his fingers to play the electric bass guitar like a maniac.

 

 

lol.. nailed it.

[o00o]

unless someone makes it to 'superstar' status through a combination of years worth of hard work and luck, the majority of producers either have normal jobs or other ways of achieving a stable income. it's not something that is talked about a lot because everyone wants to live off solely from their music but it's just not realistic for the majority of people. there are a lot of statistics about this kind of thing, i think i read somewhere that you have better odds at being a professional athlete than being successful as a musician. oh well

 

 

was it this article:

 

http://www.playahata.com/pages/banner/hiphopmathematics.htm

 

These are the actual figures compiled from industry sources although the group name is fictional all numbers and situations are real:

 

New York City's hottest new group is G Murder, a four-piece gangsta' rock group from Brooklyn. Because they've got buzz, the band gets a 15% royalty rate (higher than the traditional 12%), a few points above the usual amount for a new artist.

 

Its debut, "Crunktastic," goes gold - only 128 of more than 30,000 records reached that level in 2002. The Gold Record Gross: 500,000 albums sell at $16.98 = $8,490,000 The G Murders' royalty is 15% of retail. That's $1,273,500.

 

But the Contract calls for "packaging deductions" of 25%, so the gross drops to $6,367,500. Then there's promotional albums and giveaways the labels give to wholesalers, retailers, radio and the press. That's a "free goods" charge of 15%, so the gross drops another to $5,094,000. So, the band's royalty is actually: $764,100. The record company keeps the packaging and "free goods" funds. After collecting a $9.99 wholesale price, it also reaps an additional $829,900. The $3,500,000 balance goes to retailers, assuming they sell the record for list price.

 

Because the band was hot, they got an advance from the record company of $300,000. They spent $200,000 of that recording the album, which included a $50,000 advance to the producer. They pocketed the remaining $100,000. Additionally, the label spent $100,000 making the band's first video, which got them played on MTV2. The band owes all of this money back to the label.

 

So the royalty drops to $364,100.

 

But the band's producer also earned a 4% royalty of $203,760, of which he already received $50,000. So the band has to pay him an additional $153,760, reducing their royalty to $210,340.

 

After pocketing $310,340 (which includes the remaining $100,000 of the advance), the band has to pay their manager 15%, or $46,551, and give 2% of the total deal, or $101,880, to the power lawyer who got them the deal in the first place. That takes the band down to $161,909.

 

That's not bad money, but it's split four ways, or $40,477.25 each, about the same as a city sanitation worker with two years' experience, without health benefits, vacation and retirement fund. But with, of course, groupies.

 

Let the students ask their parents how much money they make, if parents decide that is too personal to share have the students ask them how much are their monthly bills and multiply that by 12. Math is the best way to help this sink in.

 

More lessons in math should follow. Educators must "carpe diem" this and show the youth how unrealistic it is to expect to be a highly paid athlete and that the chance that they will make it as a musical entertainer is even lower but as a highly paid musical entertainer is against all odds. According to the National Federation of State High School associations, the odds at becoming a professional athlete were always bad. The chances of getting into the pros in baseball are 0.50, 0.09 for the NFL, and basketball is even lower. Consider rap odds are lowest of them all even though it has no official governing body like sports. Comparatively a average hard working student has a better chance at becoming a brain surgeon or a successful attorney.

Emphasize that unless you sell millions and millions of records it takes a lot of time before the artist typical 12% royalty rate pays some dividend. Industry expert Wendy Day told me last year "If you have a standard 12 point deal you going to have to pay back millions of dollars in money that was spent to pay radio, studio time, to shoot video from your 12% royalty." Day said the recoding industry is set up like share cropping, you have to pay back all monies that are spent and usually artist don't control how the money is spent.

[Guest chax]

i don't recognize that site. i think it was from some music industry blog or something. i might try to find it later

[chassis]

To be fair, Vibert, James and Jenkinson dont have to pay for producing or recording studio. I dont think?

 

But read what chax said, he haz gud anzwer 4 qu3stion,

[Chris Moss Acid]

they make music for a living and

 

tom writes the odd article in the Telegraph.

 

richard makes a hansom sum every sunday when topgear plays the entire 26 remixes for cash album back to back while driving cars around a race circuit.

[funkaholic]

how come the album that was supposed to follow window licker was never released?

[Guest bigs]

a dog ate it.

 

for some reason i feel like most of the idm crowd, afx aside, lead pretty relaxed but unglamorous lives. i doubt they are worried about money, but i doubt they blow it all too quickly (again, rdj being the exception, lol. exception and most successful.).

[Guest Drahken]

As that article outlined the money to be made from album sales and signing advances isn't too grand, but that article also assumes you need a lot of assistance and are recording in a professional studio setting. I suspect most of these artists made the bulk of their income from licensing music for commercials and the like, with live performances filling in the gap.

[Guest tompty]

aphex made his money as the majority still bought music in the 90s.

there is absolutely fuck all money in selling electronic records now, only live shows.

 

but i would like to know if they are making enough money to not have to get a regular job