A Royalty Pain

Robert Hilburn completely missed the point in “Time Is Not on the Side of Long Albums� (May 21). Artists release 70-plus-minute CDs with 15-plus tracks for more than just their creative ego. Like most music business decisions, this one involves money: lots of it.

Publishing royalties--�mechanical� royalties, also called the “ASCAP� or “BMI,� which is in addition to the typical $1 per CD “artist� royalty--are 6.95 cents per song. (Songs longer than five minutes earn more, but for argument’s sake, 7 cents is a useful figure.) Record companies do limit mechanical payments to newer bands to 10 tracks per disc (i.e., a 15-track CD by an emerging artist would generate the same mechanicals as a 10-track CD). But yes, “if everyone else’s CD is 70 minutes, so will mine,� the argument goes. And once a band enjoys some big sales, mechanical royalty limits are likely to be among the first things to disappear from a renegotiated contract.

As for those artists who hit big and still claim they haven’t “sold out,� check out the bloating on their more recent CDs. Maybe their music is just as good; their business, evidently, has improved substantially.

DAVID HORNE

Los Angeles