Brehmer has been the morning guy on WXRT in Chicago for about fifteen years, part of a team of DJs who are arguably the smartest and most music conscious of any at any commercial outlet in the country.

This was his latest Facebook post:

Lin Brehmer If you have received an email from my place of business concerning a political action and it is allegedly from me, rest assured I did not write the email; I never read the email; and i certainly never endorsed the email before it was sent to over 100,000 listeners. It’s just something they do. Send out emails and sign my name to them without my knowledge. I will always be on the side of the musicians.

He doesn’t say what the email was about, but, based on his last line, one can guess that it was apparently an email broadcast, sent under his name, from CBS Radio, ‘XRT’s corporate owners, about the moves by the music industry to try to exact a performance tax out of radio.

Currently, radio kicks into a fund to pay songwriters when a song is played; when the industry got going, it was exempted from a performance tax, one that would go to the artists (and, not unimportantly, to their labels), on the sensible grounds that radio airplay represented free publicity.

Now the industry, which has been undergoing a delightful-to-watch financial waterboarding for the last decade, is scrabbling to get Congress to give it a performance tax.

Radio, as you can imagine, isn’t happy about it. Here’s a sample of CBS Radio’s argument:

Congress is considering a law that could force some of your favorite radio stations to limit the amount of music they play, or even drive some stations to stop playing music altogether by enacting a performance tax on free broadcast radio.

The NAB’s dedicated site to the issue is here.

Leaving aside CBS’s skanky use of Brehmer’s name, it’s a hard issue to come to a decision on. Commercial radio, which has treated listeners with contempt and the public airwaves as corporate ATM machines for decades, is in such horrific financial straits right now that (pace my friends at ‘XRT) one is reflexively in favor of anything that would help put the nail in its coffin.

On the other hand, it would seem that at least half of the performance fees would go to the labels, arguably the one entity in the U.S. entertainment industry more corrupt than commercial radio itself.

And MP3s and the internet have made radio irrelevant to serious music fans, so it’s no longer the menace it was when it controlled fans’ access to music.

An ideal solution would be for Congress to enact a performance royalty for radio that goes exclusively to the artist.

Since we’re fantasizing, it would be nice if Congress also enacted a law placing formal fiduciary responsibility on the labels in terms of their handling of artist royalties, which would create a strict legal mechanism to correct the current state of affairs, which allows labels not to pay royalties essentially with legal impunity.

The Daily Swarm links to this Guardian story, which takes a look at the internet radio service called Jango:

Payola – the illegal practice of paying or in any other way bribing a radio station to play your song – has existed since the advent of pop music. In the 1960s, Alan Freed was the first person convicted of payola and the book Hit Men described in detail how the practice was rife in the 70s and 80s. When the US government clamped down on it, record companies (and the radio stations benefiting from payola) got around the problem by paying “independent promoters” who would do the dirty work for them. But as recently as 2005-06, three of the major labels were indicted and settled out of court for pay-for-play practices.
[…]
Now webcaster Jango has come up with an ingenious way of legitimising these bribes, by declaring publicly that they’ve been paid to play songs. For as little as $30, a band can buy 1,000 plays on the music-streaming service, slotted in between established artists (who don’t pay for their slots, I assume). The artists themselves choose what other music they’d like to be played next to.

Like too many people who write about payola, the writer, Helienne Lindvall, doesn’t … understand what payola is. There’s no law against paying someone to play your songs on the internet, and Jango isn’t doing anything “ingenious.”

There is a law that says US broadcasters have to disclose payments for airplay, along with some other requirements. The broadcasters are using public airwaves, of course, and under statute at least are supposed to be operating in the public interest. Ha.

On the internet, who cares? Let the listener beware.

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.

From the NYT:

Local radio advertising fell a staggering 21 percent in November from the same month a year earlier, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau’s most recent figures. National advertising was down 25 percent.

That’s not even Clear Channel’s big problem! The company, according to the story, is making a ton of money. But the guys who took it private last year basically went in debt to the tune of $19 billion.

Another report from the It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Group of People Desk:

Four years ago, Clear Channel opened up a new ad strategy, “Less Is More.” With stations clogged with ads and listenership decreasing, the company decided to try to stress shorter ads, and run fewer of them per hour. According to the Wall Street Journal ($), the company is now abandoning the strategy.

The story runs the numbers in various ways. Whether the strategy worked at all is open to dispute; the company’s radio division (like the industry as a whole) has been stagnant for years, but it’s possible that without the plan sales would have dropped farther. Still, for Clear Channel haters (like Hitsville), this is good news. The company contributed mightily to the ruination of radio in the late 1990s by buying up stations, running up the number of commercials per hours, ramping up the use of voice-tracking*, and de-localizing the industry generally. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the company’s execs acted like thugs and flouted federal ownership rules, as my colleague Eric Boehlert detailed with a great deal of brio in Salon in the early 2000s.

The rise of the iPod, internet radio and satellite has been a challenge for the terrestrial radio industry over the past half decade, but Clear Channel was losing listeners at the rate of several percent a year dating back to the mid-1990s. Anyway, the company’s stock price is off by a third since the “Less Is More” strategy started. Now it’s forced back into its traditional “screw the listener, let’s load up the joint with crappy ads” gambit. And that, you gotta think, will, in the long run, inevitably lead to even fewer listeners, poorer Arbitrons, less revenue, and a bigger stock decline.

*  Voicetracking is where a supposedly local radio station has its crappy DJ patter taped in bulk and in advance by someone in a different city, and then digitally stripped in between the songs.

We tend not to appreciate, or even notice, the the real glories of our age. We’re too busy thinking about the good old days to take in the finer things in our own.

Like Mac Davis, I say stop and smell the roses.

For example: In the NYT the other day was a Jeff Leeds story about the newest trend in radio. It started out talking about the single “Apologize”:

WIOQ-FM, a pop station in Philadelphia, played the song 123 times last week, letting as little as 50 minutes tick by between repeat spins. And this month, “Apologize” broke the record for the most plays of a song on the nation’s Top 40 stations in a single week since computerized tracking began in 1990. The song played more than 10,240 times in a week, reaching an estimated audience of more than 70 million listeners, according to Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, an airplay monitoring service, and the chart-keepers at Radio & Records, a music trade magazine.

The new trend, it turns out, is playing hit songs more than ever:

[E]xecutives at some individual stations say they are playing hits more heavily than they did even two years ago. That is not so much out of concern over digital competition as it is a desire to respond to listeners’ busy lives, said Kat Jensen, music director for KKMG-FM in Colorado Springs, which played “Apologize” 78 times last week. “There’s a very limited window. If they’re going to listen 15 minutes a day, you want to make sure they hear their favorite song in that 15 minutes. It’s really the fast-paced life style that we all live.”

OK, now hold that thought. Over in the WSJ ($), there’s a backgrounder on Live Nation, more fully detailing how the company will be pursuing a new agenda heralded by the Madonna deal. Basically, with record companies vulnerable, there is room for other rock operations, like the live concert business, to make money in various ways off of artists. It’s all very glamorous, what with Madonna involved, and roiling sales channels, and newfangled artist-corporate partnerships. So it all seems, until you get to this graf:

At the same time, however, Live Nation is tackling the much more mundane task of streamlining the company’s existing business through measures like increasing the profitability of its venues’ snack bars.

In other words, radio stations are playing the same few songs over and over again; meanwhile, the nation’s biggest concert promoter is jacking up the price of its nachos. Strategies like this aren’t rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; they’re poking a few more holes in the hull. Can you imagine the strategy meeting at Clear Channel? “I’ve got an idea–let’s make radio worse!”

Now of the two, Live Nation (which used to be Clear Channel’s concert arm) is better positioned; a great deal of money passes through your average concert venue. The problem is that the artists who play in those venues now carry vacuum cleaners with them to suck up as much of the money as possible. More from the Journal:

[Live Nation CEO MIchael] Rapino says Live Nation now realizes that no matter how big the company gets, it will always be in a weak position when negotiating fees with superstar acts. “We do not believe the cost of talent is going down,” Mr. Rapino said. “Just because we’re big, we’re not going to pay Aerosmith less.”

According to a slide displayed during the investor conference, the company typically ekes out just 4% operating profit on revenue that last year totaled almost $3.7 billion. All of that profit comes from parking fees, sponsorships, beer sales and a cut of the service charges imposed by Ticketmaster, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

The music industry periodically goes through difficult times like this. It always reminds of something William Randolph Hearst said back in the ’50s. Word had come that Stalin had had a stroke; the world waited for days to find out what happened. Said Hearst: “I hope it’s nothing trivial.”