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RIAA Forgets to Make Royalty Payments
theodp writes "NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer agreed with the RIAA on one point - artists WERE being deprived of money that was rightfully theirs. But Spitzer managed to find $50 million for performers without shaking down grandmothers. Spitzer's culprits? A Who's Who of the nation's top recording companies - members of the RIAA - who failed to maintain contact with artists and stopped making required royalty payments."
From the Article ( bold emphasis added):
While this will be great for a lot of artists I question the motive. I doubt that Eliot Spitzer is doing this for artists. I'm sure New York state will benefit from the interest revenue from "hold[ing] these monies. It won't hurt his career to have his name in the paper either.
Of course, I didn't bother to look up his record. Maybe he really is just doing his job, protecting the citizens of New York State.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Oh well. Good that they caught this. The artist do deserve their money.
I am as anti-RIAA as the next guy, but this doesn't seem all that bad.
The RIAA is going out of there way to correct a royalty problem that may/may not have entirely been their fault. And the article makes it seem that it was the idea of an RIAA lawyer.
Just my 2 cents...
Don't villianize the RIAA. It's not their fault the artists didn't want their money. After all, it should be the artists responsibility to track all playings of their song around the world.
That lie aside, the RIAA sucks. I'm glad I'm not a musician on an RIAA label, I would hate myself.
hrrm.
Don't tell me the RIAA are a bunch of hypocritical, dishonest bastards! Now I have nothing left to believe in.
Friggin' corporate pirates should be MADE to pay their proper dues!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
In Soviet Russia, RIAA pays you!
I don't understand why the government has not seen the RIAA as an orginization that doesn't adhear to the rules that it's set for everyone else. They have such deep pockets, they can make the effort to locate the artists and pay the royalties. Don't be surprised that this has happened. There's much more to come out of this...
Another question would be WHY the RIAA lost touch with these artists. Was it on purpose or accident?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
"Standard Industry Practice."
RIAA members ripping off their artists is nothing new - it's been documented over and over and fucking over again. I'm sure some slashdotters can point to half a dozen articles written by artists who point out that, by the time the RIAA gets done doing the math on a "standard" industry contract, an even moderately sucessful artist winds up OWING a few thousand dollars to the label and is pretty much an indentured servant, because they can't jump labels to find a better deal by the terms of the contract.
What we REALLY need is for some court ruling to take all those fucking provisions, and declare them illegal. THEN when the RIAA cries about "artists" being deprived of money due to file sharing, I might give a rat's ass about their bullshit argument.
I find it completely unconsionable that the RIAA failed to protect the artists rights and make payments when due. Claiming they couldn't find the artists involved is a fabrication of the most fraudulent kind. It's not like David Bowie has fallen off the face of the earth.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Does this mean that since the RIAA is out 50 mil... (that THEY diddn't think to give to the rightful owner).... the 50 mil will be deducted from the amount of money made through cd sales so they can whine a bit more about file sharing?
Except that the artist doesn't always know that they are owed the money. Do you think they keep track of the sales of every one of their songs (both written and recorded)?
Forgive my oversimplification of the RIAA (and Anti-RIAA) tactics, but it seems to me like this is such a cat and mouse game. Someone points out problems with the RIAA, the RIAA points out problems with filesharing. One-Up to P2P, One-Up to RIAA. I'm waiting to see if politics, technology and common sense can elicit some sort of resolution to this perpetual nonsense. I won't hold my breath.
coming to terms with the fact that the new-yacht-a-month club is going to have to tone down and make with what they already have.
A digital robin hood am I, and through my uploading I give to the poor.
"Hi? I'm calling for Mr. er... Ziggy Stardust. ... Wrong number? Oh, sorry to have you bothered you. It won't happen again."
Prominent artists who were owed royalty payments included: David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Harry Belafonte, Liza Minnelli, Dave Matthews, Sean Combs and Gloria Estefan.
Ummm....how exactly do you lose track of your prominent artists? And for that matter, why aren't the agents of these artists banging down the doors at Sony, BMI, Vivendi, EMI, and so forth to get the royalties? IOW, the agents conveniently forgot to collect? Something doesn't sound right here -- when in the history of business has someone not aggressively pursued their debtors?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Some artists do not even know they are subject to reimbursement or royalties from the RIAA, they just happen to sign up with a small company (which is part of)^n an RIAA member...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
According to CNN, sales dropped about 7.5% from 2002 levels of 32.2 billion to 2003 sales of 32.0 billion. RIAA blames "rampant piracy" for this.
Therefore, according to RIAA, piracy accounted for 200 million in sales loss. Therefore (unless artists get 25% or more of retail) with this announcement of withholding 50m in royalties from artists, the RIAA itself is personally responsible for more monetary loss to artists than piracy.
I didn't know you had to 'agree' with a law before it was applicable to you. Interesting.
The RIAA has sued what, 3000 people so far? With an average "catch" of $2500 each? If these numbers are correct, that's $7.5 million. Versus $50 million that RIAA cheated their own artists out of!
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
Have any of you ever paid a bill slightly (or even very) late? Ever take out a loan, with which you intended to enrich yourself, and then take longer to pay it back than you originally contracted?
If yes, do you then have the right to criticize the RIAA?
The fact is, RIAA's actions, though despicable, are ultimately irrelevant to whether or not it is morally acceptable, and/or should be legally acceptable, to copy and distribute someone else's work without authorization, contract or payment arrangement. The fact that RIAA members were lax paying artists does not give anyone a free pass, morally or legally, to download music illicitly. It does not make the claim that artists are being ripped off by illegal music downloaders any more or less debatable.
This is not an issue appropriate for posting to slashdot IMO. When the story deals with whether downloads are/should be acceptable, it's a tech story. When the story is about an RIAA conflict with artists, and the sole reason for posting it is to wag the finger of shame at RIAA for being hypocrites (ostensibly), that's just pandering and incitement.
...paid...they should be paid with interest plus fined/sued for compensation. This is a perfect opportunity to point out that there shouldn't be one rule for consumers and one rule for the conglomerates.
I am NaN
Somwhere at an RIAA office:
"Hello, kettle it's the pot, line 2, he's says your black"
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Kind of reminds of me of some bigger (cough - Catholic Church) examples (cough - US war effort).
I'm sure that last bit will get me slammed. There goes my karma =D
I must point out that it is only individual members of the RIAA, not the RIAA itself, that are responsible for failing to pass on the royalties, and this in no way reflects RIAA policies. It simply shows poor or irresponsible book keeping on the part of the companies involved.
To pre-empt any ad-hominem replies: I do not like the RIAA's tactics & I was once signed to one of the companies mentioned (BMG). But claiming this is an RIAA act is entirely incorrect, self gratifying FUD, and as we all know, spouting crap in lieu of facts does not make a convincing case. If you want to criticize a system, learn how the system works first.
Try looking here
With all of the noxious public actions they have taken it turns out the RIAA is the biggest music music theif of them all.
So, I wake up from a five year coma. I go looking for my royalty checks, and am told that they are being held by the state.
So, I go down to the Comptroller's office in Lincoln and ask where my money is. They tell me it must be some other state. Well, my brother is in Florida... I'll call there. Nope. Oh, yeah, my mom in Arizona, maybe it's that state. Nope.
Why would my money be in New York? Why not California where a "marginal" majority of these contracts are signed? It's great that the proceeds from this money will go to benefit the people of New York, but what if I don't live there?
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
RIAA forgets to pay royalties? From the article it was the RIAA lawyer who brought the problem up. The RIAA member companies were not forgetting to pay anyone. They had lost contact with the artists not through any fault of their own, but because the artists had not updated their contact details. Shite - even evil entities are capable of acts of good. In this case the RIAA did the right thing.
Who says they haven't? You are making the assumption that the government believes that the rules apply equally to everyone. If that were the case, then Oprah Winfrey would have been fined or taken off the air for indecency. Microsoft would have been punished under anti-trust laws and for illegally maintaining a monopoly. There are many many many other examples, these are just some of the more high profile ones.
The rules do not apply equally to everyone.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The royalties are nothing to the RIAA, the amount the artists receive are about 50 cents out of the average $15 CD. That's why the organized music industry is so strong--they have an extremely vested interest in keeping this atrocious pricing structure intact. The real reason the internet worries the RIAA is that for the first time, artists (like Prince and Pearl Jam) have the ability to completely bypass this archaic distribution system and sell directly to the consumer, without all the associated markups, and receive a larger piece of the pie. Commercial distribution systems like iTunes are actually closer to traditional CD/vinyl sales, at least in their royalty structure.
Many artists probably don't know the money is owed to them and no doubt the RIAA doesn't make it easy for artists to keep track of their royalties. Also, many successful artists aren't very educated and don't understand all the "legalese" in their contracts. The RIAA probably depends upon a lot of artists' naivete and/or ignorance. I remember when Tupac Shakur died his mother found out that he was penniless and that somehow all the money that he got were someohow "loans" from the record company. Artists can easily be taken advantage of by the record companies, especially if they directly deal with the company without a lawyer or agent. It's the same kind of game that the IRS plays. Many people who don't use HR Block or have someone knowledgeble do their taxes, file a short form and pay much more in tax than they should. The IRS isn't going to go out of their way to educate these people. The RIAA probably has the same attitude --"...your ignorance is our profit...".Kudos to Spitzer for successfully getting the RIAA to "do the right thing" even though one could easily argue that they did nothing illegal. Hypocrisy is annoying, but it's not illegal :)
Morals do matter.
You can't make a claim about filesharing on moral grounds if your own morals are suspect.
If you're a crook, its hard to take cries of "thief" very seriously.
What's the difference? I personally think there should be astronomical fines, terminations and prison time for RIAA executives.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I love music, and used to spend a lot on buying new CDs before this RIAA shakedown started. Stories like this, however, have made me change my ways, and now I buy exactly $0's worth from any label that supports the RIAA.
It's appalling to think that this is all done defending artists from file sharers when their watchdog is either this clueless or dishonest...with the RIAA, it's hard to tell which.
Artists might fare better if they could see an alternative to this corporate mire. Perhaps if they understood that consumers would be more supportive of the music if there was some reasonable guarantee that money would actually get to the artist rather than a conglomerate?
Granted I have no guarantee of that with my current label selections, but I feel better knowing that my cash isn't feeding the anti-piracy machine.
- Jack
Time to flush the toliet on the middlemen. Boycott industry music, and roll your own crap. All this talk about the important role of the middle men in choosing good music, and what do we get? Good Charlotte, Britney Spears, Sean Puffy PDiddy Combs? Give me a garage band anyday!
The Canadian wing of the RIAA, the CRIA, convinced our lame government to put a levy on blank CD media. Their argument was that people were using the media to rip CDs and thus the every day musician was getting short changed for his/her hard work. The gov't agreed and the funds collected through this levy were assigned to the CRIA to be redistributed to artists as compensation.
In reality, the CRIA has only redistributed a microscopic portion of the fund to the artists - the rest has been going right into the CRIA's coffers. How's that for compensation....
For example, I've forgotten that I need to be bothered with buying overpriced CDs for the past 8 years. Instead, I've been spending my cash on video games, DVDs, live entertainment and socializing with my friends.
And sometimes I also forget that I don't need to buy a CD in order to determine whether I like the music. P2P has been gracious enough to keep reminding me of this whenever I feel the urge to go to the nearest Virgin Megastore..........
If you wanted to pay Bowie for some service he performed, how would you go about doing it?
If I worked for the Recording Industry Association of America? Then gosh, I would call up the record companies that are members and funders of my organization and say, "Hi, Vigin? It's Bob at RIAA. I need to get ahold of David Bowie. Yeah, he's under B. Sure, I'll wait."
I'm guessing that since they do millions of dollars worth of business with him, they'll have some idea of how to get ahold of him.
This might not always be easy to do and might be time consuming per artist.
Did you note the part about $50 million? If they put that in a regular bank account, they can get $1m per year in interest. So it's not like they couldn't find the funds to hire a clerk to look into this. Their, "Gosh, honey, look at this $50 million I found under the couch cusions," line is not particularly plausible.
Let's not forget the obligatory:
1. Charge people waaayyyyy too much for plastic, shiny disks
2. "Accidentally" lose track of famous artists, one of which lives in a huge amusement park that a 3 year old from Japan could locate
3. ????
4. PROFIT!!!!!! YEAH baby, YEAH!!
*rinse* *lather* *repeat*
John "Dripping with Irony"
Okay, I'm going to comment on this whole "why weren't the artists trying to collect their money?" thing...and why they may not have realized they weren't getting paid. Not every artist waits by the mailbox for their royalty check like a kid at Christmastime. Hell, I wouldn't doubt that many labels have some sort of direct deposit system set up to save on postage. Now imagine you are Sean "Puffy" Combs. You have millions of dollars. Not only that, but a majority of your income is NOT from royalties...in fact, I'm betting royalties aren't even a significant portion of his income. He makes money for producing other groups, off his own record label, of promotions (such as Xbox Live), and off a million other things. Is it unreasonable to think that maybe he simply hadn't noticed that the deposits for royalties weren't there anymore? For further perspective, I have a very rich in-law. He doesn't balance his checkbook. He knows the money is in there, he knows the check he's writing will not bounce, and he pretty much take's his bank's word for it when the statement comes. He looks over it, of course...but not as closely as those of us who face the actual possibility of running out of money do. He's not anywhere as wealthy as Puffy.
The money goes to the state where the entity collecting the money is based.
What if I live in Nebraska?
If they can't find you to send you the money, how would they know to send it to Nebraska?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
NY DA Spitzer is doing a far better job at
protecting citizen's rights from crooked
corporations and corporate executives than
the US DoJ, which appears to be unenthusiastic
about corporate fraud or monopolistic actions.
(No big surprise here, huh?)
A recent interview with Spitzer on the
"Charlie Rose" program gave me a new level
of respect for this crusader. He has no
stated political ambitions (or agenda)
beyond doing a great job as DA for the
citizens of NY and the USA.
I would really like to see him run for
President: he reminds me (historically)
of Teddy Roosevelt, a populist AND
conservative (in it's best definition)!
Let me get this straight. They claim that they couldn't send people their royalties because they had lost touch with them.
How the hell do you lose someone like Bowie?
They obviously weren't trying very hard...
I submit that Dolly has far better terms than some relatively unknown/new/crap band, and probably does rather well with mechanical royalties, and other royalties than the unknown/new/crap band.
IOW, Dolly is most likely making money in areas that an unknown/new/crap band would not, such as printed sheet music, covers by other artists, film and television, and public performance (musak, etc.).
That said, it's not surprising that the whore-tards in the RIAA wanted to 'misplace' those extra dollars; what is surprising is that the missing artists' lawyers weren't all over those nickels and dimes in the first place - especially Dolly's lawyers. She likes the money.
Even more reason to bypass the RIAA. What you lose in enforcement (public performances, radio play) and marketing, you gain in knowing that you are getting the best deal as an artist.
I'm glad someone found this story and pointed this out. All along we've considered the 'Napster issue' from an impartial POV when yes, DUH, everyone knows what crooks these recording company execs are, everyone knows at least half a dozen horror stories about how songwriters and performers are getting ripped off all the time. Music is supposed to be nice, and beneficial, and soul-soothing - it's a wonder and a mystery why these lowlifes get into the business in the first place.
Both David Lindley and Courtney Love have spoken out eloquently against them in the past. I think we should remember who the real villains are here - and that they're not 13yos with a few songs on a hard drive.