"This is how a group can sell 10 million albums and be broke. Everyone get ready to do your math."
This is a line from one of the most telling moment's of VH1's recent TLC biopic, CrazySexyCool. This movie was well done overall and worth watching for anyone who has an interest in learning more about what goes on behind the scenes in a band's career, in this case a band that was stuck with some seriously bad contracts. After multi-platinum albums, sold out tours, and what should seem like extraordinary success, the band found themselves without a penny and they came forward after winning GRAMMY Awards, as it shows in the film, to tell the world what was really going on. Later in the film though, the girls are doing an on-air radio interview with callers who believe they must have just gone broke because they spent all of their money and Left Eye decided to break it down for everyone to help them understand just how they could be so successful and yet still be starving artists:
"Y'all 100 points on an album
TLC has 7 points
Each point is worth eight cents
7×8 is 56
Got it?
10 million albums, $5.6 million
Now we owe the label 3 million for travel, production and videos, right?
Okay, that leaves us with 2.6 million which puts us in a 48% tax bracket
Which now leaves us with 1.3 million to split three ways
And on top of that we gotta pay managers, lawyers, and did I forget that Pebbles [their manager] is suing us for damages so we in the red for a couple hundred grand that we don't have"
- Left Eye in the CrazySexyCool biopic
So what exactly does that mean and what does it tell you about how artists get paid? Let's take a closer look.