Re: The Wayback Machine / RE: (TV) Tomspotting

[Rex Broome <rexbroome@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 7:59 AM, Phil Obbard <pobbard@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I would not be surprised if Tom works at the Strand. How much money do we
> think
> he's making from his records, seriously?
>
> Aside from royalties for Bowie's cover of "Kingdom Come", has any
> Verlaine/Television record ever made money? If it took Richard Hell's BLANK
> GENERATION until 1996 to break "even" (and to have made roughly $20,000 in
> royalties by 2000, or about $5k/year, only some of which goes to the
> artist) how
> much can Verlaine have made from records over the years?
>

Well, they've made someone enough money that, thirty years later, people are
willing to put the energy and money into reissuing the first two Television
records, presumably expecting to benefit financially from it.  And labels
still sign Tom and put out his (rare) new records, even if they drop him
fairly quickly thereafter (I have no idea if he's stilll on Thrill Jockey).

But you know, every time a topic like this comes up, I get mildly infuriated
that there's no way for us mere mortals to just go and check how many copies
a given album has sold.  Sales figures for the best-sellers are easy to come
by, both on the weekly charts and the occasional surveys of how Boston's
best-of has sold more copies than there are grains of sand in the night sky.
 But if I want to compare sales figures between "Dream Time" and "Alchemy",
or get solid numbers on just how poorly "Cut the Crap" sold or how many
people have bought the Modern Lovers records over the years, I can't.

The weird thing is that the film industry is just the opposite... the
grosses of every film are in the paper every Monday, and even video sales
and rentals as well as foreign totals are talked about all the time, good or
bad.

-Rex
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