I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.

Now, I don't ever expect that unrecouped balance to turn into a positive number, but since the band had been seeing thousands of dollars in digital royalties each year from IODA for the four indie albums we control ourselves, I figured five years' worth of digital income from our far more popular major label albums would at least make a small dent in the figure. Our IODA royalties during that time had totaled about $12,000 – not a princely sum, but enough to suggest that the total haul over the same period from our major label material should be at least that much, if not two to five times more. Even with the band receiving only a percentage of the major label take, getting our unrecouped balance below $375,000 seemed reasonable, and knocking it closer to -$350,000 wasn't out of the question.

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47.

What the fuck?

I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they're also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn't insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.

Why It Was So Stupid

Here's the thing: I work at Rhapsody. I know what we pay Warner Bros. for every stream and download, and I can look up exactly how many plays and downloads we've paid them for each TMJ tune that Warner controls. Moreover, Warner Bros. knows this, as my gig at Rhapsody is the only reason I was able to get them to add my digital royalties to my statement in the first place. For years I'd been pestering the label, but I hadn't gotten anywhere till I was on a panel with a reasonably big wig in Warner Music Group's business affairs team about a year ago

The panel took place at a legal conference, and focused on digital music and the crisis facing the record industry**. As you do at these things, the other panelists and I gathered for breakfast a couple hours before our session began, to discuss what topics we should address. Peter Jenner, who manages Billy Bragg and has been a needed gadfly for many years at events like these, wanted to discuss the little-understood fact that digital music services frequently pay labels advances in the tens of millions of dollars for access to their catalogs, and it's unclear how (or if) that money is ever shared with artists.

I agreed that was a big issue, but said I had more immediate and mundane concerns, such as the fact that Warner wouldn't even report my band's iTunes sales to me.

The business affairs guy (who I am calling "the business affairs guy" rather than naming because he did me a favor by finally getting the digital royalties added to my statement, and I am grateful for that and don't want this to sound like I'm attacking him personally, even though it's about to seem like I am) said that it was complicated connecting Warner's digital royalty payments to their existing accounting mechanisms, and that since my band was unrecouped they had "to take care of R.E.M. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers first."

That kind of pissed me off. On the one hand, yeah, my band's unrecouped and is unlikely ever to reach the point where Warner actually has to cut us a royalty check. On the other hand, though, they are contractually obligated to report what revenue they receive in our name, and, having helped build a database that tracks how much Rhapsody owes whom for what music gets played, I'm well aware of what is and isn't complicated about doing so. It's not something you have to build over and over again for each artist. It's something you build once. It takes a while, and it can be expensive, and sometimes you make honest mistakes, but it's not rocket science. Hell, it's not even algebra! It's just simple math.

I knew that each online service was reporting every download, and every play, for every track, to thousands of labels (more labels, I'm guessing, than Warner has artists to report to). And I also knew that IODA was able to tell me exactly how much money my band earned the previous month from Amazon ($11.05), Verizon (74 cents), Nokia (11 cents), MySpace (4 sad cents) and many more. I didn't understand why Warner wasn't reporting similar information back to my band – and if they weren't doing it for Too Much Joy, I assumed they weren't doing it for other artists.

To his credit, the business affairs guy told me he understood my point, and promised he'd pursue the matter internally on my behalf – which he did. It just took 13 months to get the results, which were (predictably, perhaps) ridiculous.

The sad thing is I don't even think Warner is deliberately trying to screw TMJ and the hundreds of other also-rans and almost-weres they've signed over the years. The reality is more boring, but also more depressing. Like I said, they don't actually owe us any money. But that's what's so weird about this, to me: they have the ability to tell the truth, and doing so won't cost them anything.

They just can't be bothered. They don't care, because they don't have to.

"$10,000 Is Nothing"

An interlude, here. Back in 1992, when TMJ was still a going concern and even the label thought maybe we'd join the hallowed company of recouped bands one day, Warner made a $10,000 accounting error on our statement (in their favor, naturally). When I caught this mistake, and brought it to the attention of someone with the power to correct it, he wasn't just befuddled by my anger – he laughed at it. "$10,000 is nothing!" he chuckled.

If you're like most people – especially people in unrecouped bands – "nothing" is not a word you ever use in conjunction with a figure like "$10,000," but he seemed oblivious to that. "It's a rounding error. It happens all the time. Why are you so worked up?"

These days I work for a reasonably large corporation myself, and, sadly, I understand exactly what the guy meant. When your revenues (and your expenses) are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, $10,000 mistakes are common, if undesirable.

I still think he was a jackass, though, and that sentence continues to haunt me. Because $10,000 might have been nothing to him, but it was clearly something to me. And his inability to take it seriously – to put himself in my place, just for the length of our phone call – suggested that people who care about $10,000 mistakes, and the principles of things, like, say, honoring contracts even when you don't have to, are the real idiots.

As you may have divined by this point, I am conflicted about whether I am actually being a petty jerk by pursuing this, or whether labels just thrive on making fools like me feel like petty jerks. People in the record industry are very good at making bands believe they deserve the hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of dollars labels advance the musicians when they're first signed, and even better at convincing those same musicians it's the bands' fault when those advances aren't recouped (the last thing $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man yelled at me before he hung up was, "Too Much Joy never earned us shit!"*** as though that fact somehow negated their obligation to account honestly).

I don't want to live in $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man's world. But I do. We all do. We have no choice.

The Boring Reality

Back to my ridiculous Warner Bros. statement. As I flipped through its ten pages (seriously, it took ten pages to detail the $62.47 of income), I realized that Warner wasn't being evil, just careless and unconcerned – an impression I confirmed a few days later when I spoke to a guy in their Royalties and Licensing department I am going to call Danny.****

I asked Danny why there were no royalties at all listed from iTunes, and he said, "Huh. There are no domestic downloads on here at all. Only streams. And it has international downloads, but no international streams. I have no idea why." I asked Danny why the statement only seemed to list tracks from two of the three albums Warner had released – an entire album was missing. He said they could only report back what the digital services had provided to them, and the services must not have reported any activity for those other songs. When I suggested that seemed unlikely – that having every track from two albums listed by over a dozen different services, but zero tracks from a third album listed by any seemed more like an error on Warner's side, he said he'd look into it. As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: "We don't normally do this for unrecouped bands," he said. "But, I was told you'd asked."

It's possible I'm projecting my own insecurities onto calm, patient Danny, but I'm pretty sure the subtext of that comment was the same thing I'd heard from $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man: all these figures were pointless, and I was kind of being a jerk by wasting their time asking about them. After all, they have the Red Hot Chili Peppers to deal with, and the label actually owes those guys money.

Danny may even be right. But there's another possibility – one I don't necessarily subscribe to, but one that could be avoided entirely by humoring pests like me. There's a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today's technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result.

If that's true (and I emphasize the if, because it's equally possible that people everywhere, including major label accounting departments, are just dumb and lazy)*****, then there's more than my pride and principles on the line when I ask Danny in Royalties and Licensing to answer my many questions. I don't feel a burning need to make the Red Hot Chili Peppers any more money, but I wouldn't mind doing my small part to get us all out of the sad world $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man inhabits.

So I will keep asking, even though I sometimes feel like a petty jerk for doing so.

I do not share this information out of a Steve Albini-esque desire to rail against the major label system (he already wrote the definitive rant, which you can find here if you want even more figures, and enjoy having those figures bracketed with cursing and insults). I'm simply explaining why I'm not embarrassed that I "owe" Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn't make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn't lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase "just don't earn enough" for the word "lose."

** The whole conference took place at a semi-swank hotel on the island of St. Thomas, which is a funny place to gather to talk about how to save the music business, but that would be a whole different diatribe.

*** This same dynamic works in reverse – I interviewed the Butthole Surfers for Raygun magazine back in the 1990s, and Gibby Haynes described the odd feeling of visiting Capitol records' offices and hearing, "a bunch of people go, ‘Hey, man, be cool to these guys, they're a recouped band.' I heard that a bunch of times."

**** Again, I am avoiding using his real name because he returned my call promptly, and patiently answered my many questions, which is behavior I want to encourage, so I have no desire to lambaste him publicly.

***** Of course, these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive – it is also possible that labels are evil and avaricious AND dumb and lazy, at the same time.

Reprinted with permission from Too Much Joy.

Trade in Your DVDs, Plus a Couple Bucks, and Get the Blu-ray Versions

Warner set up a DVD to Blu-ray exchange program called, appropriately enough, DVD2Blu, as sort of a more-tempting version of its HD-DVD to Blu-ray version. The problem is, it's not actually that great of a deal; you're limited to Warner movies, obviously, but it also costs $8-10 per DVD, plus $5 shipping, for the exchange. You might actually be better off just hitting Best Buy or Walmart or whatever and looking for sales, since DVD2Blu could cost you 18 bucks plus the agony of waiting for your new HD copy of The Wedding Singer: Totally Awesome Edition to arrive. [Engadget]

Steve Ballmer Acknowledges Apple's Gains, Remains Cocky

Microsoft held a shareholder's meeting this morning, led by the always-dynamic Steve Ballmer, and an interesting question came up: Why does Microsoft have such a lousy reputation among certain demographics, like, say, upper-middle-class college kids? Ballmer admitted that Apple's been seeing some gains that, while small, are a clear sign that Microsoft has room for improvement, either in marketing or product positioning. It's a pretty clear-headed statement from Ballmer—after all, he notes, Microsoft still has an insane marketshare, even in the high-end consumer demo, so despite Apple's visibility, Microsoft doesn't exactly have cause for concern. That level-headedness is why this story's in Remainders: Where's the explosive, frothing-at-the-mouth, prone to Bidenesque gaffes Ballmer we all know and, um, know? [TechFlash]

Sanyo to Build Houses Powered by Solar Energy and Li-Ion Batteries

Sanyo, considered Japan's "greenest" electronics manufacturer (sort of like being the best-dressed homeless person), is about to start building solar-powered, lithium-ion-based homes in its native country. The houses are all equipped with LED lighting, solar-powered water heater, all that stuff. They'll be a little pricey, at around $355,000—an equivalent non-green house would cost $62,000 less, although the Sanyo houses come with a $30,000 government subsidy. It's in Remainders because it's Japan only, and because I don't understand enough Japanese to learn any more about it. [Crunchgear]

Sony Announces Vague "iTunes-Like" Store on PlayStation Network for Books, Movies, Music

Sony announced the tentatively named Sony Online Service today—it's described as an "iTunes-like" service on the PlayStation Network, offering movies, music, and books, all media for which Sony also sells accompanying hardware. It'll also allow users to upload their own video, and will probably have support for independent app development later on down the road. We don't really know much else, like, say, a launch date or pricing (or even a final name), so it winds up here, alone in the dark corner of Gizmodo we call Remainders. [AppleInsider via Engadget]

The Watchmen BD comes out July 21, then Zack Snyder will host a community screening (allowing viewers to watch the movie along with his live commentary on their Blu-ray players) during Comic-Con on July 25. Is the experience worth the price of the disc alone? Definitely not. But if you're a big Watchmen fan, the screening is certainly a nice bonus if you're already purchasing the Blu-ray on day of release. I just wonder if Snyder's bladder is heartier than Nolan's. Place your bets on pee breaks now. And remember, Watchmen is a long movie, too. [Video Business via engadgetHD]

The Red2Blu trade-in program is designed to get people burned by HD-DVD into the Blu-ray fold. Simply mail in your HD-DVD cover art (you get to keep the discs!), pay $4.95 per movie and $6.95 for shipping and get brand new copies of the same movies on Blu-ray in about a month.

Of course, it only works for Warner Bros. HD-DVDs/Blu-rays, but if you've got a few kicking around this ain't a bad deal. [Red2Blu via Engadget]

Is John Connor relaxing inside his stylish aviator jacket/nuclear submarine only to be jumped by a T600 lurking behind one of his CRT monitors? Or did some camera guy just leave the red recording light on again?

I'm not sure the photo is conclusive either way, but the suspense is killing me. Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures, check out another exclusive shot over at io9

From a recent interview with the director McG:

I wanted to shoot the film with this dead stock [old film that has been distressed to give the movie a desaturated look]. Therefore it wasn't conducive to shooting it in IMAX format. But we're going to bump it up to IMAX. We are going to bump it up, and it holds up very nicely, and it looks and sounds that much more impactful. But one price we had to pay for making those choices was that we didn't shoot in IMAX.

That's an interesting point about the film stock being a limitation. As I understood it, Terminator Salvation was shot on normal color film stock that used triple the silver in processing to create a different look—but McG is saying that the source stock was distressed to begin with.

I'm not sure that we can use every development technique for IMAX film as we can 35mm, but even if it's possible, my guess is that price and convenience came into play when sourcing the movie on 35mm, too. [Sci Fi Wire]

That's right. They won't let you choose which stuff you can upgrade. This has been reported already, at least by this guy—and I suppose it's not new news given the fact that they've done upgrades since EMI went DRM-free a while back—but the scope is much greater now that all the labels are on board. After returning from a week of Macworld and CES to the comforts of home, the impact of this has hit me, like the baseball bat I took on the cheekbone back in 1993.

You're snickering. Not about the baseball bat (I hope), but about the whole spending-money-on-iTunes thing. Yep, I am a recovered iTunes DRM-music-buying addict. I still pay for music, but now Amazon is the legitimate source of all my thankfully DRM-free impulse buys.

Last Tuesday's announcement that iTunes would go DRM-free was good news in several ways: Not only might iTunes win me back as a customer, but I also would be able to upgrade the best stuff I bought over the years, so I could have it in high quality, playable not just on my Apple (TM) products, but also on Sonos or BlackBerry or any other fun music-savvy device that comes in and out of my house.

So I clicked "Upgrade To iTunes Plus" and I got a gun to my face saying "$250 or else."

Seriously, they want $250—actually, they want $250.06 but what's a few pennies between lifelong friends?—to upgrade the 1,000+ songs I've bought over the years. That would mean that all those albums I paid $9.99 for would actually cost me $13 in the end. That's the same amount the damn CD would have cost me in the first place, if I still bought those museum pieces. And the CD would have given me the option to rip at higher quality than 256Kbps, and would come with liner notes telling me who played that sick drum solo on Track 12, to boot.

The clincher was this: When I went to click on just the albums I really wanted to update, the "upgrade" price was... full price. WHA?? I clicked on the FAQ, and this is what I saw:

I remembered a similar bulk upgrade offer before, when it was just EMI's content, but as you can imagine, the price they wanted for that was less scary. I must've paid it (probably under the influence of alcohol). I haven't caved this time—not yet at least. I'd be faced with having to explain a $250 iTunes charge to the wife without getting any new music, movies or music videos to show for it. She's a cool person and all, but I wouldn't escape that conversation without some kind of half-accusatory, half-pitying "Oh babe."

Do you see what you're doing to me and to my family, iTunes? I guess you do: You are only the monster the music industry has made you for screwing with their decades-long con. Amazon definitely got the better deal, most likely for appearing harmless—no doubt their inevitable contract renegotiation will be a bitch and a half.

And to those of you out there who steal music instead of buying it, well, frankly, I can totally see why. [iTunes What's New]

To refresh, BD-Live is the Blu-ray technology that allows for more interactive special features on your disc, like being able to arrange "screenings" with your friends or record commentary tracks yourself.

It all comes down to the technology. Instead of having director Chris Nolan talk into a mic and answer questions as they were asked via the website, Nolan had to do all his own typing. Or, we assume it was Nolan and not some designated typist, since the answers were slow going and contained a bunch of typos. The largest problem was that the text, displayed IRC-style with a white overlay behind it, was too small (on my PS3, at least), forcing me to sit closer than I normally would.

Smaller issues included Chris Nolan connecting and disconnecting every two minutes for the first 1/3 of the movie, which lead to the unfulfilling situation where questions were displayed but his answers were dropped. He also intentionally stayed silent or deftly evaded when certain questions on sensitive topics chosen by the moderator, such as piracy, making a third movie and any talk of money.

There were some enjoyable moments, such as when he took not one, but two pee breaks, explaining that he needed to make a shorter film next time. Fortunately, the BD-Live format let him pause everyone's movie simultaneously. He also reused the same joke three times in different formats, thanking an actor or a contributor by name when someone asked how awesome it was working with said person.

Here's how to fix the experience. Give Chris Nolan a microphone. Make whatever adjustments you have to make to the BD-Live technology to allow a low-bandwidth audio stream to reach however many players were signed on last night. Then, record the "podcast", and let people who were still at work (it was on at 6PM PST) watch it after the fact whenever they like. I stare at chatrooms all day at work, don't make me stare at another one when I'm watching Batman tearing around Gotham City.

AppleInsider cites a Dec. 3 story from the French publication Electron Libre that says iTunes will remove DRM from Sony BMG, Universal and Warner tracks on December 9th, like it already does with EMI and indie content. The story doesn't say what percentage of tracks from the major labels, or what the cost bump for the new tracks might be, if any, though it seems to say the thing might cover every single album and track on iTunes. In fact, check out this rather ungraceful machine translation of the French story for yourself:

...The signals are clear today. iTunes should offer catalogs of three majors Universal Music, SonyBMG Music and Waner [sic] rid of technological protection measures next Tuesday, Dec. 9. The transition to DRM Free should be at a global level...

With that opener, it almost reads like a fortune. I for one hope this fortune comes true. [Electron Libre via AppleInsider]

Until that day does or does not come, here's a very brief Terminator Salvation motion poster teaser. It has no real content, but it's just eerie enough to snap you out of that turkey coma:

The problem with this set of advantages, though, is that they're shared with virtually every other physical format. You know, the ones that that have been careening towards extinction since high-capacity MP3 players made it big? That said, if it comes down to buying an album on a CD or a reusable SD card, the choice is clear. In either case the music is likely to be copied to a computer or iPod rather than lugged around on its own individual piece of plastic, but why not get a perfectly usable 1GB SD card out of it? If you're keeping your Discman spinning on account of scary sync software and the high price of overladen MP3 players, maybe SanDisk's minimalist $20 unit is right for you. Check below for the (respectable) artist release list. [SanDisk]

* ABBA
* Chris Brown
* Coldplay
* Connie Talbot
* Daughtry
* Don’t Quit Fitness Bundle
* Elvis Presley
* Five Finger Death Punch
* Jimi Hendrix
* Jimmy Buffet
* Katy Perry
* Keane
* Kelly Clarkson
* Kiss
* Leona Lewis
* Lynyrd Skynyrd
* Metro Station
* MIA
* Nelly
* New Kids On the Block
* Ne-Yo
* Nickelback
* Pussycat Dolls
* Rihanna
* Rise Against
* Robin Thicke
* Saving Abel
* Shwayze
* Solange
* Sugarland
* Tim McGraw
* Toby Keith
* Usher
* Weezer
* Young Jeezy

Extras included on the first disc also include "Gotham Uncovered: Creation of a Scene," a "focus points" version of the film containing behind-the-scenes vignettes with director Christopher Nolan and his team discussing the planning of the film, the use of IMAX photography, the stunts, and more.

Disc two will feature additional extras presented entirely in HD, including a pair of featurettes ("Batman Tech," "Batman Unmasked: The Psychology of the Dark Knight"), the "Gotham Tonight" collection of six episodes of the Gotham Cable's Premiere network, and "The Galleries," containing multiple still galleries, theatrical trailers and TV spots.

Apparently the collectible limited edition is exactly the same as the standard Blu-ray edition, except it'll come in fancy Bat Pod packaging.

The standard edition will retail for $35.99 (though it'll probably hit shelves for less), while the premium edition has yet to be priced. On a completely unrelated note, Gizmodo will not be in service from December 9th until further notice. Our apologies. [HiDef Digest]

It's impossible to say how these'll work in the market where instant and convenient downloads are a click away, since you'll have to either buy one in a physical store, or purchase them online and wait for them to come in the mail.

But you can guess that downloading market is why the music biz is trying to grab back control of at least some of their music sales. There's no official data on pricing, but word is it'll compare to existing CD albums, and a list of titles will hit in time for the holiday season. [SlotMusic]

Jason Chen: I'm Batman!
Mark Wilson: I'm Batman!
Jesus Diaz: I'm Batman!
Matt Buchanan: I'm Batman!
John Mahoney: I'm not that guy from Frasier! [DVDTown Thanks Eric!]

No word on the complete list (it is lengthy though) or exact date, but some of the many flicks getting the cheapness are: The Shining, The Aviator, 300, and I Am Legend. Hopefully this'll push some of the other studios to lower prices as well, so Blu-ray flicks are more in line with DVD cost-wise. If there's one kind of war we love, it's a price war. [High Def Digest via Crunch]