Singer Goes Into Marketing and the Flip Side Is Profit

Ten years after Columbia Records dropped him as a recording artist, 43-year-old singer Tom Rush is back in business as president of his own mail order record company, New Hampshire-based Night Light Recordings.

“A record company’s function is to connect the artist with an audience, and when they ceased performing that for me, I had to find a different way of doing it if I was to keep working,” he said.

In fact, Harvard-educated Rush may have found a better way. He is selling fewer records than he used to and he’s making more money. Rush’s first Night Light album, “New Year,” cost about $40,000 to record.

According to Rush, the album has sold 15,000 copies at $8.95 each, for gross sales of about $134,000. Rush estimates that the cost of manufacturing, packaging and royalty payments to songwriters and other performers on the album is about $3 a copy. So $134,000 less production and per-copy manufacturing costs leaves Rush with net profits of $44,000.

If that does not seem like much, compare it to what Rush would have made on the record if it had been released by his old label.

At Columbia, Rush’s contract called for him to receive a royalty of about 40 cents a record, with production costs deducted off the top from his share of royalties--a standard industry practice. Consequently, for an album that cost $40,000 to produce (very cheap by today’s standards), Rush would have to sell 100,000 copies before he saw a penny of royalties. To make $44,000, he would have to sell more than 200,000 copies. On sales of 15,000 copies, he would owe Columbia $34,000.

What’s more, major labels like Columbia “release an album and track it closely for six weeks and then, if there is no sign of life, they drop it,” Rush said. “They sell whatever they are going to sell in the first six months. The industry thrives on novelty.”

“Yes, it is a better living than I made when I was working for Columbia,” Rush said. “The difference, of course, is that I’m putting up my own money to make the record. But it’s far more interesting and gratifying taking those risks and winning.

“They tell me I’m an entrepreneur,” he said with a chuckle. “I’d prefer to be called a folk singer, but I’ll be whatever I have to be in order to get my wares in front of the public.”