“…and we’ve sold over 8 million records,” the multi-platinum album selling artist muses in regards to the music industry in its current form. La Roux –of course most likely known to the EDM world for her heavily remixed ‘Bulletproof’ hit – shines a light on the industry in an even more mainstream and macro sense, showing that electronic music is not the only genre losing out in the hyper-information digitized age of information. In a year where album sales hit an all-time low and a slowly sliding decline in digital music sales has begun to occur, the almighty medium of streaming audio is continuing to compromise the revenue of the professionals themselves. La Roux revealed to Digital Spy that,
“I think it’s very important that if you decide you like something, to invest in it. Having all the music in the world for a set fee, I hope one day it works and benefits the artist as much as I think it should. I think that’s what all those services are hopefully trying to work towards, but at the moment it’s difficult and there is so, so little money in music. I’ve never made any money from record sales, and we sold nearly 8 million records if you count all the singles. There’s something not right about that…”
She goes on to discuss the reality of the necessity of passion in an industry where, surprise, surprise…the bulk of artist incomes are made from radio spins and live touring:
“I spent two years on Trouble in Paradise and I most likely won’t make any money out of it. The only money I will make is from radio play. All the money I’ve had up until now is from radio. I think people find this really, really, really hard to believe. It’s not a lie, it’s just the way it is. It’s fine as long as people don’t think you’re a millionaire, which people sort of do. Until you start getting to much larger venues, if you’ve got a five-piece band like I have, you find it very difficult to break even. We don’t break even. Thank God we’re really passionate about what we do and we don’t mind when we lose money. We will try to make money by moving up to larger venues and building ourselves up as a live act, so that’s become unbelievably important, which has been great for the music industry.”
To check out what else the songstress has to reveal about the new age of digital music, check out the full interview on Digital Spy.