I came to think about a thing earlier today, upon reading a new post by my brother: why on earth am I writing in English? I used to be better, you know, but these days my written English flows slower, and I’m constantly watching myself do grammatical errors. Maybe I should start writing in Swedish, breaking a decade-long tradition of publishing on the web. or maybe not. Maybe I should do both, mixing it up. Nar. This is, after all, a good exercise, and I would probably spam my own blog if I were to shift to a language that lets me babble to my hearts content. Still, I’d like to write in Swedish again. My brother’s newly started blog made me yearn for cursing in Swedish words again. It’s entertainment. Rantertainment.
So, anyway, I just came home from a cup of coffee with my friends Buck & Werner. Buck, I hadn’t seen in years. We used to do drunken online word-battle way back when. Sparring partners in cusswords. Today, we came to discuss music distribution. It came to my knowledge that a Swedish record store pays 100 Swedish crowns + VAT for a CD. That means that a store pays about 13 euros per CD! No wonder records are expensive in regular record stores. If you’re using an independent distributor, you (the record label) get maybe 55 crowns per CD. Then the distributor adds maybe 45 crowns. The store adds taxes, and another 30-60 crowns. If it was not so bad, I’d call it hilarious. But now? Maybe preposterous? Or just plain silly. This means that bigger companies with their own distribution makes 100 crowns per CD, BAM! into their pockets. Of those, maybe 5, 10, 15 goes to the artist. The rest goes to something else. The corporate machine. The beast. The husk, as I called it before. Something needs to be done, and done now, and it has nothing to do with punitive measures. If not, I fear that much of the music industry, including independents, will have a hard time surviving. That would be a pity, indeed, but it has little to do with piracy per se, but with silly price tags and too many stratas involved. Someone ought to clean that biz up, but good.