Kevin Shine is an A&R consultant for Jive Records. Kevin has dedicated a large part of his time to teaching up and coming artists about the inner workings of the music business. In this video, he makes it plain about what an A&R does and shares his distaste for those who abuse the position.

In this video, Krs-One and Buckshot share their thoughts in Independence Day and the contrast or lack there of between independent and major labels.

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About 4:30 into this video Prince gets it in about major labels and how they get over on artists. He also talks about restructuring the way artists deals are made and much more. Prince has been around a long time, seen it all, and was one of the first artist to leave the major labels to sell his music over the internet. There’s definitely a lot learn from this dude.

Check it out…With the way most deals are structured, you may earn more working for a fast food restaurant than you would by having a platinum single. Here’s why…

Let’s suppose you got a record deal, a decent signing advance, and sold a million singles of your song “Bodacious Booty Bounce”. Your situation may breakdown something like this…

Maybe your signing advance is around $150,000. Sounds good right? Don’t get too happy yet because you have to pay all of that money back to the label before you make a penny off of your single sales.

“Booty Bounce” sells on iTunes for $.99. iTunes gets 30 cents of every single sale because they’re gangsta like that. Seriously though, see back when the labels were suing people and panicking at the thought that people were stealing and trading their music on the internet, Apple (a fucking computer company), figured out a way to make people enjoy the process of purchasing music online. They created the market and therefore, set the rules. If it had been left up to the labels, you better believe you would be paying 2.99 for a digital download. iTunes set the price at $.99 which upsets the labels to this day. Apple didn’t care. They were in the business of selling iPods, which they sold a shitload of. It was a stroke of genius! But let me get back to the subject at hand. Read the rest of this entry »