“A lot, 200,000 euros.”
This is how journalist Jordi Évole defined, in his recent television interview with C. Tangana, the amount of the Madrid native's contract with Sony in 2017, when he was still a very promising, but quite
underground
, musician .
To which Tangana responded: “Pastón?
If you look at it from Sony's side, no.
It is important that, when you do not earn 200,000 euros, you know the magnitude of what those who do have 200,000 euros earn to buy a kid, which for them is putting in a chip.”
The (pertinent) question is: does 200,000 euros today mean “a lot” in terms of signing bonus, to put it in football jargon, to get an artist with his global impact?
Carlos Galán, co-founder of the independent label Subterfuge, is clear about it.
“He generates much more.
C. Tangana bills that with the cap,” he says in a telephone conversation.
“That amount is a bargain.
Whoever made that contract will surely have important recognition in the company.
Although what seemed most symbolic to me about that interview was putting in
a token
, because it is part of the current times.”
Galán, who also directs the podcast
Sympathy for the music industry
, where he interviews business personalities, warns of the financial power that the three
majors
now wield .
“Streaming is giving them money and they play roulette, in the sense of putting chips in different numbers and in both colors.
If out of ten attempts you get a C. Tangana, then all the others would already be covered.
It is clearly a strategy of signing the drag.”
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“You see Tangana triumphing on stage, but you don't realize that there is so much suffering behind it”
A very damaging
modus operandi
for small independent companies like yours.
“It is impossible to compete on an economic level, but that has always been the case.
The problem is not those figures that we cannot reach, but that the contracts are very lax in time, three or five years.”
Galán explains how major record labels have discarded the habit of creating their own catalogues, developing the entire career of an artist, which became part of the label's history.
“Now they are more medium-term than long-term.
Since everything is immediate, instant success is sought.
We live in fast food
culture
at all levels.
If something has to work, it has to do it now.”
Universal, Sony and Warner are the three
majors
that Galán mentions and that take up a large part of the record market.
According to Music Business Worldwide, a music industry analysis website, in the first six months of 2023 alone they jointly invoiced $13 billion (about €12.14 billion).
Universal generated $5.57 billion;
Sony, 4.47 billion;
and Warner, 2,960 million.
These figures, which represent one billion dollars more (about 934 million euros) than what they achieved in the same period of 2022, include recorded music, publishing and other sources of income.
Jota, from Los Planetas, during a concert in Mexico.ALFREDO ESTRELLA (AFP via Getty Images)
For Javier Liñán, director of the production company El Volcán, “200,000 euros means nothing without a context.”
Liñán, who before founding his own record company was employed by RCA, Warner Chapel and Virgin, argues that he would need to see the contract to know the concept for which they are paying that amount.
“How many albums has he signed for?
Is the owner of the master C. Tangana, who later licensed it to Sony?
Or is the owner of that master Sony?
That money, what is it?
An advance of
royalties
that they will then deduct from what his album generates? ”he asks by phone.
“Because they are very different concepts and they are the
crux
of the matter.
Contracts have changed a lot since the pre-digital era.
In fact, there are many problems with all those that were made until two decades ago, because the label paid for a master's degree, exploited it and paid royalties
to
the artist.
But that royalty was paid in concept of physical units sold.
At the time when the digital environment took off, all of those agreements became obsolete, because they did not contemplate downloads or streaming
.
”
The master is the original sound recording, from which physical copies are made and on which
streaming
platforms such as Spotify are based.
If a musician wants to maintain ownership of it with the record company, he usually has to pay for the recording, cover photos, video clips and other associated expenses.
Liñán, who worked for years as A&R (Artist and Repertoire, the person in charge of discovering new talents in a record company), was responsible for bringing Los Planetas to RCA, where they published their debut,
Super 8
, in 1994. “That contract It must be from 1993 and the panorama has changed a lot,” he recalls.
“And, unlike now, at that time The Planets were nobody.
I don't remember well, although I suppose they wouldn't charge any advance.
I know that nowadays Jota [the leader of Los Planetas] is not at all happy with what he signed at that time, but I'm sure he thought it was phenomenal then because he had a label that paid for the recording of an LP in a great studio.
Advances are usually paid when there is a certain track record.
If you are just starting out, it is difficult for that to happen.”
Even so, the director of El Volcán assures that 200,000 euros for someone of C. Tangana's caliber is not money, “because what his songs can produce is brutal.
Or even the video clips of it.
Videos that are preceded by an ad make a lot of money on YouTube.
And for someone like C. Tangana, that YouTube income can be tremendous.”
But how tremendous can tremendous income be?
“I have worked with a musician who is quite popular among the younger audience, although not widely known as Pucho, and a video clip of his, which received good advertising investment, generated 30,000 euros a year,” Liñán confesses.
Carlos Galán is of the same opinion.
“In the Latin and
urban
market you pay much more than 200,000 euros.
There are ultra-strong contracts, in the millions.
Any kid who makes urban music and who has a certain power to produce thousands of
streams
can lose a fortune, because larger amounts are put on the table.
Surely what C. Tangana will do will be an advance, because he no longer believes in going to a loss fund, which was used when the industry was even more powerful and earned more.
“That is no longer contemplated.”
Rosalia performs during a concert in Paris.Kristy Sparow (Getty Images)
Yes, the physical sale of records will have plummeted since the last century, however, at its peak (say, the eighties), it also had a very limited commercial period.
Most LPs were sold for a season and then practically discontinued.
“Now the song stays posted on the internet and continues to earn revenue year after year,” Liñán clarifies.
In the case of C. Tangana, and according to the data provided by Sony in 2022,
El Madrileño
, his second work on this record label (the fourth in total), was “the most requested album, physically and digitally, of 2021” in Spain and accumulated more than 2,000 million views worldwide.
Three years later, her single
Too Many Women
has already had more than 382 million listens on Spotify alone, while
Tú me stopped loving
has more than 376 million listens.
Promusicae, the association representing the Spanish recording industry, proclaimed in 2002 that
El Madrileño
had sold 160,000 units in Spain alone.
That number didn't just include physical copies (on vinyl, CD or, oops, cassette), but also included downloads and
streaming
.
“The latter involve very complicated calculations, since a certain number of streamings mean a copy, but depending on the platform where they occur, they count more or less.
YouTube is not the same as Spotify.
And neither the paid Spotify nor the free one,” explains an executive in the industry who prefers to remain anonymous.
It's not the only one.
In the
majors
, a kind of law of silence prevails regarding the numbers of their contracts and what they bill thanks to their artists on the payroll.
After dozens of attempts to contact different executives of multinational record companies, only one of them (who also prefers not to reveal his name) has agreed to assess the amount of the signing.
For him, signing a contract with C. Tangana today would cost “around seven or eight million euros.”
Another head of an
indie management company
, very aware of this type of movement with top-level stars and who also does not want to see his name published, maintains that “a contract for three albums would have an advance of about ten million euros.
Then, obviously, there would be variables, such as the percentage of
royalties
or the management of image rights.
But the gross figure would be that.”
Now, the musician who has negotiating power is trying to sign agreements of a shorter duration.
“That's why some jump from label to label,” says Liñán.
And he points out the paradigmatic case of Rosalía, that she published her first album,
Los Ángeles
(2017), on Universal;
the second,
El mal donder
(2018), on Sony;
and the third,
Motomami
(2022), in Columbia, a subsidiary of Sony.
“Or Alejandro Sanz, who was at Warner practically from the beginning of his career, in 2011 he went to Universal and, since 2023, he has been at Sony,” he points out.
What has occurred is the
jibarization
of the middle class of the music industry.
Either you win big or you get crumbs.
“In the nineties, an
underground
group could sell 5,000 physical records.
Today selling that is crazy,” says Liñán.
“The physical format for this type of bands has become a
merchandising
product for concerts.
They are very small runs, 300 or 500 vinyl units.
If they sell 1,000 they are already big words.
And many small artists don't even release on CD anymore.
Or they release 1,000 copies, but because it costs almost the same as making 300, not because they are going to ship 1,000.”
And in the digital field things are not looking better for the vast majority.
Recently, Spotify has confirmed that, from 2024, it will only pay royalties to songs that have more than 1,000 annual listens.
The company's official version is that this measure will affect very few songs and 99.5% of its catalog will continue to obtain some benefit.
Although those who reach one million listeners don't have much to celebrate either.
In a 2023 interview in the Greek edition of
Rock Hard
magazine , Dani Filth, the frontman of the British metal band Cradle Of Filth, did not mince his words and became the penultimate musician to thunder against the Swedish corporation.
“Spotify are the biggest criminals in the world,” he said there.
“I think we had 25 or 26 million listens last year and I personally received around 20 pounds [about 23 euros].”
These must not be the recent digital dividends of C. Tangana, who in the interview with Évole also revealed his past economic hardships, remembering his pre-stardom stage as an employee at a Pans&Company on Madrid's Gran Vía, with a part-time monthly payroll of 350 euros (that company, according to him, still owes him 600 euros).
Perhaps the comparison with such miserable work led him to compose
Espabilao
, one of the songs that included
Ídolo
(2017), his first album after signing with Sony.
There he told/sang: “To 'the guild, to' the guild.
“I have signed the most expensive contract in Spain of the entire union.”
Maybe the current Pucho regrets having written that stanza.
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