How much money did Clarence Avant screw this guy out of?

I just saw this movie and I have a couple of thoughts about this. Record contracts are a funny thing. Of course for any individual it could be different, but a common approach is to advance the artist an amount of money, for the purposes of recording, producing, marketing and distributing the album. The record is then sold in shops, and the artist is paid royalties, one for the performance and one for authoring. These royalties make only small portion of the sale price, I think now days for a $19 CD its about 75 cents for the performance and about $1.50 for authoring.

The initial advance is kind of a loan. If the record sells, it needs to be paid back. If it doesn't sell, there is no payback, hence why artists use record companies in the first place. This is called recouping. Artists only receive payment, on top of the original advance, once the advance is recouped.

It may very well be that while royalties on 500,000 copies were paid back to the record company, by the time it reached Clarence Avant's company there was so little left the contract was never recouped.

One statement Clarence Avant made was "who cares about a record contract from the 1970's? I don't or something to that effect. The way it came out and across it seemed he was the bad guy, trying to cover up these royalties that he'd not passed on. But what he may have actually been saying is "that contract, owned by my now defunct company, never got recouped, but if there was some interest in this guy and money to be made, I don't care about the old contract, he can go ahead."

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You're MISSING the point of "follow the money"!! Segerman said that in his HOPE to FIND Rodriguez, the BEST way would possibly be to FOLLOW THE MONEY! His INTENT was not to find the money for the sake of finding money, but the HOPE that by following the money, he would eventually FIND Rodriguez.

Make sense to you now, over-thinkers???