Can producers survive in the 21st century?

The massive reduction in sales of recorded music has had the effect of not only reducing the personal income of those who traditionally benefitted from it, i.e. artists, record producers, publishers, managers and record companies, but has also fed back into the financial structure and reduced the amount of money invested in record production; recording budgets are much lower than 5-10 years ago.

Thus, recording producers are hit at both ends; reduced budgets means lower advances, and reduced sales means lower royalties.

Artists have, to a limited extent, been able to compensate for this loss by increasing the number of live performances, but record producers (and, it should be noted, non-performing song-writers) have no such comparable option.

As record producers’ overall income has decreased, they have been forced to try to seek ways of achieving financial benefit from other, associated, sources, e.g. a share of an artists’ publishing, sync, PPL, PRS income.

So far, this has been negotiated on an individual basis, but there is an opportunity for the MPG to play a major role in helping those individuals achieve greater success in this area.