{"id":698,"date":"2026-08-31T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/31\/the-label-staff-just-assume-the-artists-get-rich-i-told-a-girl-in-the-office-what-we-earned-her-jaw-hit-the-floor-steve-hogarth-recalls-marillions-bad-old-days-before-cro\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T16:00:00","slug":"the-label-staff-just-assume-the-artists-get-rich-i-told-a-girl-in-the-office-what-we-earned-her-jaw-hit-the-floor-steve-hogarth-recalls-marillions-bad-old-days-before-cro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/31\/the-label-staff-just-assume-the-artists-get-rich-i-told-a-girl-in-the-office-what-we-earned-her-jaw-hit-the-floor-steve-hogarth-recalls-marillions-bad-old-days-before-cro\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe label staff just assume the artists get rich. I told a girl in the office what we earned. Her jaw hit the floor\u201d: Steve Hogarth recalls Marillion\u2019s bad old days before crowdfunding"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Marillion<\/em><\/a>\u2019s revolutionary crowdfunding campaign, which they ran to fund their 2001 <\/em>Anoraknophobia<\/a> album, came after they\u2019d been dropped by their major label in 1995. The prog icons are credited with building the pledge model, which exploded across the industry until the <\/em>collapse of PledgeMusic<\/em><\/a> in 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n

By that time Marilion \u2013 who\u2019d released <\/em>F.E.A.R.<\/a> with the defunct platform a year earlier \u2013 had moved on. <\/em>Looking back in 2016<\/em><\/a>, singer <\/em>Steve Hogarth<\/em><\/a> recalled just how far they\u2019d come after making the great escape, and inspiring other artists to do the same.<\/em> <\/p>\n

\u201cThe major labels are not doing it because they love you. If they\u2019re really honest, they\u2019re not even doing it because they\u2019re excited about the music.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re excited about the new Coldplay album because they can hear there\u2019s a hit that\u2019s going straight on the radio, and it\u2019s worth a million quid. I\u2019m talking here about the people who work on the top floor, not the people who work in the offices.<\/p>\n

Another thing I learned \u2013 which really shocked me \u2013 was that the people in the offices actually had no kind of clue about what kind of deal you\u2019re on, what your royalty payments are like, whether you\u2019re getting one per cent or 90 per cent of an album. They just assume that all the artists are paid really well for what they do, and all get rich. <\/p>\n

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I remember speaking to a girl there and telling her what we earned and her jaw hit the floor. She had no idea. So there are only four people in these major labels, in the business affairs department, who have any clue what the artists are being paid.<\/p>\n

Back in those days, I don\u2019t think we felt directly pressured to change the music. The way they would exert their influence was, they would bring a producer in and they would whisper in his ear.<\/p>\n

The phone would ring and it would be, \u201cIs there this and is there that? Have you made sure there\u2019s enough of that?\u201d That way, they didn\u2019t have to come to us as artists and say, \u201cCan you sing it a bit more like that and is there enough chorus?\u201d \u2014because they were whispering at the producer. <\/p>\n

The label would always insist on appointing a producer because he was their control system: who knows what the fuck you can do with artists, but you can whisper in a producer\u2019s ear.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, that was a long time ago.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marillion\u2019s revolutionary crowdfunding campaign, which they ran to fund their 2001 Anoraknophobia album, came after they\u2019d been dropped by their major label in 1995. The prog icons are credited with building the pledge model, which exploded across the industry until the collapse of PledgeMusic in 2017. By that time Marilion \u2013 who\u2019d released F.E.A.R. with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realrockrevival.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}