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Canadian Music Industry Drills Dentists
hereisnowhy writes "CBC reports that the tranquil music that wafts through many dental offices to soothe patients and mask the sounds of the drill may soon be silenced. The music industry is putting the bite on dentists -- demanding that they pay for the right to play it. The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada would also like to extend this policy to 'coffee shops, clothing stores, lounges, elevators -- even radio tunes that people hear on the telephone while on hold.' Are any composers and authors actually in favour of this, or just the publishers?"
...is that somebody might actually get paid for elevator music.
Lets not forget the people with their car radio on and their windows rolled down. They are our number one priority man.
A couple of years later I ran a bar that had live music and we played CD's. We had to pay ASCAP and BMI nearly $3000 a year to cover CD's and the bands playing cover songs.
to playing music for the sheer artistry of it? I play music, and just the fact of someone WANTING to hear it would make me happy.
Jay | http://oldos.org
There's a bit of an interesting situation here... the publishers are trying to assert themselves into what presently is a very murky space in copyright land.
Using a broadcast radio station as the hold music on a phone system actually requires a copyright license from the station from which the artists/publishers should be seeking their payment. Of course, since it'd take a lot of work to observe all of the places this is going on, it's one of those bits of copyright law that more or less has been nullified by simple non-enforcement, and therefore slipped into that consumer-friendly category known as "fair use".
Case law has more or less said in the past that if a radio station is being pumped through an amplifier system throughout a building, then whomever is doing that needs to pay because they're redistributing the station. However, if they set up a standalone radio in every room and tune them all to the same frequency, they get the same effective sounds throught the building but don't have to pay because they're not redistributing, but just letting the boom boxes do their thing. But again, that often ends up unnoticed and unenforced.
Major sports venues have to pay for copyright licenses... but your local high school football venue likely uses the same music without paying for it.
Seems like this is an RIAA crackdown just waiting to happen...
I used to work at a grocery store (I believe the title was "courtesy clerk", but I likened it to being the "head b!tch....:) ), and I asked my boss one day about the music that was pumped into the store. He replied that they subscribed to a certain radio feed and that was paid through the grocery company I worked for. It was a special feed, and the store had a tuner for the specific frequency or other.....
I would assume that most of these locations (stores, lounges, etc) follow the same sort of setup. My dentist played his own music, but I figure that would fall under fair-use, right? I mean, he's listening to it while he's working -
No fair use you say? Oh.....
My MythTV HowTo
Perhaps the RIAA members will change their tune when they go for their dental checkups, and instead of soothing music, the dentists play recorded tracks of drilling and pulling teeth.
Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada shortens to SOCAN? No way. That abbreviates to SCAMP, and everyone knows it. (and it makes more sense, too.)
Are there any recordings of tranquil music so old that they are in the public domain? If so, play those, and tell The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada that the world's smallest violin is playing for them.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I read all kinds of stories on Slashdot like this about someone being upset that someone else is enjoying some form of art without paying for the privilege. It always makes me wonder about the goals of the artists.
It seems to me that a true artist would want as many people as possible to enjoy their creation. The internet and file-sharing should be a great enabler for this, as anyone anywhere with internet access can see, hear or read their art. It is truly liberating and democratizing, making art available to all instead of only those who can afford it.
Whenever I hear an artist complain that too many people are enjoying their work without paying, I smell a rat. If you are creating art to get rich, you're not really an artist, at least by my admittedly narrow definition. Art should be its own reward. A true artist would create and distribute their work even if there was no compensation for it and they had to work a day job to make ends meet. There are countless examples of this. The passion for their craft drives them, not a desire for monetary gain (though this sometimes is a byproduct).
As to record companies and other copyright holding entities, I understand that for their business to survive, they must try to protect their assets. I just happen to think that their business model is hopelessly outdated in the midst of the digital revolution.
We are at a turning point of the information age. Will information become truly free or will access to it be controlled by "information barons"?
I'm going to hum a tune, and you can pay for the pleasure of hearing it. Then again, maybe its no longer even legal for me to hum the tune to start with, unless I bought the album, and its being hummed on an approved playback/humming device....?
This is just plain greedy.
I think we already have this kind of thing here in Australia?
True, but I can't imagine anyone actually suffering through a dental appointment just to listen to some free music. I suspect this would easily qualify as fair use. Obviously commercial establishments where people actually go to listen to the music (bars, clubs, etc.) would have to pay, but a dentist??? One could even argue that a clothing store might attract more customers by playing music, but a dentist??? Yikes, talk about picking on the wrong group.
I once read that the Boy Scouts in the US have a list of copyrighted campfire songs they are forbidden from singing because ASCAP took them to court over it.
THAT is scraping the bottom of the litigious barrel. Seriously.
TOO MANY LAWYERS.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Yeah, I would *love* for my bands' music to forever be associated with dentist drilling and pain.
If you look at it that way, the music industry should be paying the dentists to not plays their music.
And let me tell you: You'd better get it right in one take. 'Cause like I say, it's a high-paying gig. If you can't hack it, there's a line of musicians out the door looking to take your seat.
This is a standard shake-down in the U.S. Entertainment and IP lawyers get calls all the time from business owners asking "Can they do that? Do I have to pay these bastards money for playing my fsking radio?"
The answer is usually, yes. The exceptions are very narrow.
(Ever wonder why restaurant chains sing hokey made-up songs instead of the nominal "happy birthday?" Licensing fees -- money -- that's why.)
One exception, in the U.S. at least, is to play only material that is in the public domain, not subject to (ascap/bmi) licensing. As an example, Fry's in Sunnyvale plays classical piano music which is free of licensing. In the U.S., there are collections of CDs full of such material.
Of course when a business takes such an approach, the licensing authorities (sic) will make the assumption that you are a crook, and they will watch carefully and wait for you to screw up -- and then sue your ass (arse, in Canada).
Consult an attorney familiar with these rackets. I imagine that there exists or will soon exist a standard set of recommendations for Canadian businesses who wish to remain free of licensing fees (and don't expect that guidance to come from the licensing societies).
...if dentists are getting drilled by this, what's happening to proctologists?
What if I put a system in the company panel van and blasted it? Can a taxi cab driver have the radio on without paying up? Where will the insanity end?
I'd hate to have to pay to play all those CDs I'm trying to sell on the record company's behalf...
I was pretty shocked to say the least, but if you can believe it, even the 'on hold' music qualifies as "public entertainment" in the view of these idiots. Where most businesses used to be able to just tune a radio and plug that into the telephone, that practice has now effectively been outlawed. In fact, he's never played CDs in his office - he's only used the radio (nevermind that the stations have already paid the 'public entertainment' tax), and that appears to be a no-no as well.
The unfortunate solution to this whole mess was to:
stop playing ANY music in the office
replace the 'on hold' radio with a paid-for recording which has royalty-free music in the background
In the end, SOCAN didn't get much money from him, I don't think, because the royalty-free music was composed in-house in the firm that recorded his fancy new telephone greeting for waiting callers. But the whole idea riled him up so much I think they've lost the whole family in customers when it comes to buying music in the future. Go figure.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
What strikes me funny as the "outrage for having to pay for music" story goes another round on
I think there are two reasons:
commerce has pretended to give music to us for free: music is an expected part of the background in any store, at any event, for any time spent on hold. Radios broadcast the stuff for free, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Wait a second, no one does that. Strike that. Radios broadcast music for free because they receive ad revenue, and it is therefore in their economic interest to broadcast music without charge. Funny, stores do the same: a store with a soundtrack feels more polished to us because we aren't troubled by the chaos of other people's conversations. I suppose the ultimate example of soundtrack-polishing is Nordstrom's, with their live pianists.
So despite appearances music is not like air, but is used as a means of enhancing commerce. But we *think* it is, because of its ubiquitous presence in our lives.
Second, the commerce model followed by RIAA and friends stands in stark contrast to the professional model followed by classical music. In general, pop music pays by a royalty system. Concerts do provide some revenue, but the primary income stream even from concerts comes from royalties for sales of CDs and T-shirts. By contrast, classical musicians are salaried or payed per gig. (Can you imagine Perlman being payed a fee for every T-shirt sold at a Kennedy center concert?) So why does this matter? Because a salaried musician is far less likely to look for ever-more oppressive ways to squeeze revenue from his art. His salary is thus-and-so, and if he doesn't like it, well then, he negotiates with his employers.
But in a royalty system, the "employers" are the consumers. The revenue-squeezing tactics we see here are really ASCAP's way of trying to re-negotiate their salary. The RIAAs talk of "fairness" really is just rhetoric to get the foot in the door, and the squeezing will never stop.
So what is the solution? I think we all need to first acknowledge that our belief that music is free like air is simply wrong. Downloaders who expect to sample for free before paying have an unworkable expectation.
But, the royalty system for music needs to go. The industry's expectation of being paid for every "instance" of their intellectual property is unsustainable. Instead, musicians should be salaried, should make most of their income from actually performing concerts for people, and should release on CD only if they fully expect their music to be copied by others. Instead of concerts being a hook to get people to buy CDs, CDs should be a hook to get people to go to concerts. That would mean higher concert prices, but it would return some sanity to a currently insane system.
/ramble
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Are any composers and authors actually in favour of this, or just the publishers?
I asked my wife, a musician, the above question. She replied with "No, that's stupid!" In addition to thinking it was stupid, she also seemed to feel that it was more important the people heard her music than that she was paid for every time it was played.
After asking her about the 'other sides' opinion that the artists need to get paid fairly for their work, she reminded me that even though she is a musician, she won't ever receive the royalties. In her case, she plays with an orchestra. This means that it is not her that is the artist, but the orchestra. And it is not her that can complain, but rather the orchestra director and (possibly) the conductor. But more likely the recording label, not the actual orchestra.
So, OK. The orchestra gets paid. That means that she gets more money because the royalties trickle down in her paychecks. Wrong. She is paid a fixed salary, independent of how much revenue the orchestra makes.
OK, so she isn't exactly a rock star, nor does she make millions with her music, but she is still a recording artist and the law does not benefit her, nor will it ever.
In this line of thinking the recording industry had better be careful about targetting the urologists... talk about the potential for backfiring!
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
They're no more making money from the background music than they are from the posters on the wall, or the carpet on the floor.
Does the Carpet Industry Association of America demand licensing fees because customers walk on the carpet, so the dentist is clearly making money off their carpet?
Of course not, because that would be assininely stupid.
This is old, but it still applies... In fact, perhaps now, more than ever.
The End of the Internet
http://mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=494
(Some time in the near future)
I finally found a way to make money off the Internet. I did it by writing a book about how the Net died.
Not that I made any money while it existed, you see. No one did.
Oh, like everyone else, I loved the Internet for all the freedom it gave me, and the wealth of information and idea exchange, where everyone profited from that free flow of thought and information. But, you know how Man is. Never underestimate his ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!
Why did it end? Simple: It was greed.
First it started with the Spammers. There got to be so much Spam, that even Congressmen were snowed under with the daily deluge. No one could get their legitimate mail because of the thousands of fake letters these inventive Spammers were sending out with their Web bots. Congress finally made a law strong enough that any of them could be shot on sight. Some hacker then posted on the Web a public list of the lot of them, and soon they were all dead.
The public, long laboring under all that Spam, liked what they did so much, that they killed off all the hackers too. This had a profound effect on people taking computer science and engineering classes, did you know that?
That was the first nail in the coffin of the Net. We should have all paid attention to it. But no one did. We were all too busy trying to make a buck off of the Net.
The next coffin nail came when the Music and Movie companies finally paid Congress enough money to have the copyright laws changed. It was easy once Disney got them to extend copyright privileges another hundred years. The new law that Congress passed was very comprehensive! In fact, no one could listen to the music without breaking the new laws!
Now it was a Federal offense to even read or see anything that was copyrighted. If you did, there would be an unauthorized copy in your brain that you could access just by remembering. Oh, you could legitimately purchase a copy of anything copyrighted in the stores, but you could never open that copy and view it or listen to it. Tough law!
That's why all the libraries in the country were permanently closed. Right after that the schools and colleges were all shut down, and their teachers and administrators put away for using copyrighted materials in their classrooms. Students, however, were forgiven their offense in this, but all their books and notes were confiscated and burned.
The next nail came with the legal view of computer hardware. That legal POV stated that the desktop, palmtop, or laptop computer you were using could also hold, however briefly, yet another copy of any copyrighted material you might put into it, for transfer to a CD, or perhaps downloaded off the Web. Congress just attached this to their Anti-Terrorism Bill for Secure Systems Standards. Remember, these devices were considered guilty until proven innocent, just as their owners were. It seems the very existence of these machines was now suspect, because someone, somewhere, might use them for pirating copyrighted material!
Therefore all these computing devices became illegal to even own. No more Computers!
The music companies, having now gotten their way with Congress, finally had a law written that was so powerful, even they were locked up! They were all sent to prison for having a copy of their own music, which they had bought (or rather stolen) from the artists. Just deserts!
Then the movie producers and the owners of movie theaters were locked up for the same violation of this powerful new copyright law! They were sent away for distributing more than one copy of their movies.
Then the music artists and singers were all locked away for the same reason. Worse, for under the new law, many were sent up the river for playing their own songs too many time
One solution would be to get your music from Magnatune.
http://magnatune.com
All Magnatune music is licensed under the Creative Commons license with terms of Attribution, NonCommercial, and ShareAlike.
http://magnatune.com/info/openmusic
I just studied the "Licensing" page, and I think that playing music for your customers is a "commercial" use and you would need a commercial license from Magnatune. But they offer their whole catalog for commercial use, and if you license from them, you know that 50% of whatever you pay goes straight to the artist.
I'm not sure how much they would charge for a dentist to play music for customers, but the "Public Space" license (e.g. for playing music in the dining room of a restaurant) is $45 per year for one album.
P.S. I'm a happy customer of Magnatune; I admire what they are doing and I hope they succeed. I have no other ties of any sort to them.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely