Just read that the four major record companies in Canada had to pay 45 million dollars to settle a class action suit brought because at one point they just decided not to pay the artists that they were licensing songs from. The actual figure was around 6 billion dollars, but the settled! Meanwhile they are suing kids in dorms for illegally downloading songs from the internet. I guess we photographers are not the only ones being screwed!! Read here.
Meanwhile, in an article in the recent DigitalPhotoPro, a 2008 Bureau of labor statistics survey was quoted:
There are 152,000 professionally employed photographers in the US. The median annual wage of salaried photographers was about $30,000 per year, with the middle 50% earning between $20,000 and $45,000 per year. WOW. Maybe we should form record companies and start stealing from our artists..
At the same time equipment is getting more expensive, and has to be upgraded more often, and the average price we are getting for our work is dropping daily. It almost doesn’t seem worth staying in the business!