I Am Trying to Break Your Bank

I found it mildly amusing when Reprise records (owned by AOL Time Warner) dumped Wilco in 2001, opted not to release their album (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), and, in fact, let Wilco buy the rights to YHF for a mere $50,000 and walk away with a finished album in hand. Wilco subsequently signed with Nonesuch (also owned by AOL Time Warner). YHF, which Reprise described as "career ending", received nothing but critical acclaim and outsold all previous albums by the band. Wilco's second album on Nonesuch, A Ghost is Born, topped first week sales of YHT by 55%.

However, this example of music-industry schizophrenia and poor judgment pales in comparison with Mariah Carey (who is currently, unfortunately, as ubiquitous as E. coli), who signed an $80 million/four album contract with EMI in 2001. She received $21 million upfront. A year later, after her album Glitter sold only 500,000 copies in the U.S., the movie Glitter did even worse, and Carey went through a nervous breakdown, EMI opted to buy out her contract for $28 million. So EMI paid out $50 million for 1 lousy album, no doubt losing millions in the process. Island/Def Jam, which picked up Carey after EMI, is quite clearly making a killing right now – Carey’s latest album is #1 on just about every chart in the world, selling nearly 2 million copies in the U.S. in its first two months.