SPLC: Music, money, & hate

This is a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center worth reading.

http://www.splcenter.org/Music-Money-and-Hate

White power music was in trouble. But then racist bands discovered iTunes, and now they're back in business.

The racist music industry, a once lucrative source of funding for the white power movement, is a shadow of its former self. Over the past decade, it has become increasingly fragmented and disorganized in the wake of the collapse of several major labels and distributors. Concerts have become scarce and those that remain have been driven even further underground. However, the ever-resilient white power music scene has found new hope and new profit amidst the wreckage of a once multimillion-dollar industry from an unlikely source: the world’s largest music vendor, iTunes.

The digital media marketplace, owned by Apple Inc., boasts the sale of more than 21 million songs every week, from a catalog of more that 26 million songs that, as of September 2014, included at least 54 racist bands.

The catalogs of bands from across the spectrum of hate music, ranging from established acts like Skrewdriver, the Bully Boys and Max Resist to little-known, DIY groups, can be purchased as MP3s or streamed with iTunes’ radio service with ease. Providers of MP3s receive a wholesale payout of 70 cents per song and $7 per album sold, as well as an additional fee per play through the iTunes Radio interface and a proportionate share of monthly advertising revenue.