Slashdot Mirror
Musicians vs. RIAA At USA Today
An anonymous reader writes "USA Today has an article about the growing friction between recording artists and the 5 major labels which make up the RIAA. Many issues are covered, including copyright reform, fraudulent accounting on the part of record labels, and how selling a quarter million albums can leave you owing your label $14,000."
You can read the original piece by the brilliant Steve Albini here, and probably lots of other places. Thanks to some slashdot comment I read last week but have since lost.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
...Soul legend Sam Moore and other artists are suing record companies and the AFTRA Health and Retirement Funds (a separate entity from the union) for pension benefits. Atlantic, which has sold Moore's music since 1967, never deposited a nickel into his pension because of convoluted formulas tied to royalties. Not surprisingly, labels are balking at paying roughly 20,000 artists up to 30 years of back pension and health benefits.....
I wonder if this includes the artists who died penniless. (Back pension to the widowed families)
What would be nice is if they could reverse the law that lets the Big-5 keep the copyrights forever. Retrieval of copyrights back to the family of deseased artists could be a form of income for them.
Although it's possible the Big-5 think of these as revenue for themselves, the fact is, they sit on them without re-releasing songs because it's not "profitable" to them. These families have smaller overhead, and it could be profitable for THEM.