More major label bashing, this time from Mick Hucknall who, while promoting his new album, has described his former record contract with Warners label East West as "immoral". He says its wrong that, while he covered the costs of recording and marketing of his albums, the label owns the master tapes. Speaking to the Financial Times he said: "The contract was basically immoral. Like many artists, my deal meant I paid for the cost of recording the music. I paid for the marketing. And I didn't get any royalties until those costs had been incurred. But despite this the contract stated that the master recordings still belonged to the record company. I don't know any other business where you pay for something and then someone else owns it."
Hucknall’s latest album is self-released by his new label simplyred.com – which has been set up by Hucknall and his management. The experiment, said to be costing £3 million, will be of great interest to other management companies considering side-stepping record labels and releasing music, especially from major artists, themselves. There were rumours Robbie Williams' management were considering this route while renegotiating their deal with EMI, and some other major artists, fed up with their major record labels, have considered going this route.
Of course record labels would argue that while an artist's record sales income does pay for recording and marketing costs in the long term they take the financial risk, and like any investors need to take equity to cover that risk – ie the master recordings and a cut of all future sales and uses of those recordings. And while that risk is greatly reduced when it comes to bigger artists that income is needed to bankroll investment in newer acts – plus sometimes big artists have flop albums. But when bankable artists like Hucknall see their record labels making £192million profit on records that bring in about £20m in royalties for the artist and their management (as Hucknall claims was the case when he was signed to Warners) more big names may choose to go it alone – especially if internet sales (mail order and download) start to compete with retail sales and the dependency on major music retailers slides.