How much musicians make

[Obo]

What sort of percentage of record sales revenue goes to the band or artist?

[sft42]

It all depends on how good your contract is Obo but a general rule of thumb is as little as somewhere between 1 to 5 points (%) of the profits made from record sales. This may seem tiny but as record sales have really slowed up ( daniel beddingfield got to No1 this year with only 22,000 single sales in one week) in the last few years artists have made new methods to pull in revenue with a lot more merchadising and so on. Top stars like U2, Pink Floyd etc have their own publishing companies which earns them a lot more revenue as well and if you write your own songs you get a double whack of money from songwriting and performers credits from the PRS who gather income for artists from Radio stations and MTV and the like.

[Obo]

So if an album goes platinum (which I understnd is 300,000 sales), assuming an average retail cost of �13 and a record contract allowing 5% of sales revenue the band/artist would get about �195,000? What about royalities from radio play how much do they get from that?

[sft42]

Sorry Obo i can't remember it's been a while since i posted a PRS return but it depends on the amount of Airplay you get on radio and TV along with to a much lesser extent live music plays and shops etc. Try a search on google for Performing Right Society i'm sure they must have a website that should give more accurate info than i ever could.