Rolling Reissues 2022

Just found this posted elsewhere today:

Mechanical royalty rates are calculated in a completely different manner for European labels, so what may be possible for European labels is not viable for U.S. labels. There's a reason why European labels can include a ton of songs on a disc and sell it for a low price, or sell 4-fers for the cost of a single disc, or do box sets with tons of great content for a low price, while U.S. labels cannot do the same. The law in Europe is that the mechanical royalties (the money paid to the songwriters) are calculated and paid as a percentage of the wholesale price of the disc. If the wholesale price of the disc is $8, the amount paid in mechanical royalties would be the same whether the disc had 10 tracks or 50 tracks. In the U.S., it's a statutory rate paid per song -- and a 32% increase in that statutory rate just went into effect this year.

I vaguely knew that royalty payouts were higher in the U.S. when they included more songs on an album (one reason why U.S. versions of U.K. albums in the '60s had less songs), but I didn't realize how much of a difference that made in the CD era.