Corgan on Capitol Hill!
Jim DeRogatis has a post about Chicago rocker and Visa spokesperson Billy Corgan speaking before Congress about the so-called Performance Rights Act, with which the music industry hopes to extract money from radio stations for playing their music.
Radio pays songwriters a “publishing” fee, but there’s no “performance” equivalent. That is, Pepsi spokesperson Bob Dylan gets a few pennies each time Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” is played on a terrestrial radio station, but the Hendrix estate gets nothing.
… nor, incidentally, does Warner Brothers, which is really what all this is about. I’m not sure how these payments would break down. I assume it’s a performance fee rather than royalty, meaning the artist might typically get half of the payments rather than a much smaller fraction. Will research and report back.
As DeRo notes, the argument against the bill is that radio sells records with all the free airplay; songwriters get hosed all sorts of ways and so deserve their pittance, but the artist on the label is the one getting all the benefits of being played on the radio.
There’s no better illustration of this than the fact that the music industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars on payola to get radio stations to play their artists.
Seems a little churlish for them now to be taking the other tack.
If Congress had vision it would fashion the payments only to the artists themselves, the people who play on the CDs, working around the labels entirely.
The dynamic that seems to be unfolding in the industry is that the RIAA is using its waning days of influence to grandfather in some payments that will artificially keep the labels alive after technological changes have passed them by entirely. Congress should pass on the idea just on that basis alone.
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A brief response to answer a point made here: How musicians will get paid. The artist 50% of the statutory rate would be paid directly to them; it does not go through record companies at all, but through Sound Exchange, which already collects for artists directly from digital, internet, and satellite radio. The Music First Coaliton, sponsoring the Performance Rights Act, has already taken into consideration the point of direct payment to artists.
Perhaps a bit more information would benefit your suggestions above. This is not all about huge record companies and rock stars, by the way; it is also about the average, journeyman sideman, to whom those few hundred of few thousand dollars a year from Sound Exchange, which already is making a difference to these musicians, who would also be enabled in simply making a middle class living playing music.
There is more to this royalty than corporate entities and rock stars and mega-radio conglomerates. Though I am a co-owner of Rounder Records, an independent label, and not therefore owned by a multi-national record conglomerate, I still do not think those companies should be expected to pay millions of dollars to sign an artist, produce records, and pay even more promoting, publicizing, and marketing records for terrestrial radio to pay for free! It’s like Dinty Moore not paying for the beef in their beef stew!
I’m hesitant to jump in on this one, since I’ve no background in the record or radio industry, but I don’t think the “stew” analogy holds. True, radio, at least non-talk, non-public domain radio would quickly fold if record labels weren’t so generous in providing free tunes for them to play. And I think it’s great that artists are getting more compensation. But unlike the steers that go into the stew, the music is not “consumed” by its play on the air. Rather, desire for the base product, that is, the music itself, in whatever form of media you choose, is increased.
It would be as though every steak the farmer cut off the cows grew back, and for every can of stew that went out, two or three people came directly to the farm to buy a steak of their own. Maybe “starfish stew” is a more appropriate metaphor.
Radio is nothing without the record labels, but the labels, even in their heyday, aren’t a whole hell of a lot without radio. Purchasing an album “sound unlistened” would be like buying a can of stew with no label. I can’t think of too many people who’d buy food that way, and I doubt many more would buy music that way.
Other than concerts, which for a band that NEEDS exposure would total no more than ~500 pairs of ears, and the associated word of mouth, which would be perhaps triple or quaduple that for a truly good band (I think I’m being generous, if not, change the figures to whatever you like) I can’t think of how you could familiarize people with your product. Any other form of publicity would require YOU to lay out money, and until recently, as Mr. Wyman points out, radio did.
It seems to me a very symbiotic relationship radio and the labels have. Like a crocodile and the bird that picks the food from it’s teeth, the latter would starve and the former would be in a serious hurt without the other. Looks from here like the labels are a starving crocodile, eyeing the bird for some short term sustenance. It’s only going to compound the problem in the long run.