It's practices like this that make the record labels look more like the mafia than like legitimate businesses - and the kinds of margins that they grew used to are what is breeding the desperation and stupidity:

Artists had to pay their own recording costs yet companies ended up owning the records. 'The bank still owns the house after the mortgage is paid,' is how Senator Orrin Hatch described it. Could we imagine film stars having to pay the costs of the movies they starred in and then giving the rights to the company that distributed it?

Artists also had to pay a packaging deduction of around 15 per cent. This, despite the fact that packaging rarely cost more than 5 per cent. The remaining 10 per cent was enough to pay the record company's entire cost of manufacturing the record. All in all, it meant an artist who sold 200,000 copies of a first album would still owe the record company although the record company had made a profit of a million.

As the Guardian points out, the multinationals that bought up the labels expected that kind of gravy train to continue indefinitely. The end of the road caught them by surprise, and they've sent the last half decade trying to stop the future from happening. As they die, the yelling is only going to get louder.

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