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RIAA Seeks Royalties From Radio
SierraPete writes "First it was Napster; then it was Internet radio; then it was little girls, grandmothers, and dead people. But now our friends at the RIAA are going decidedly low-tech. The LA Times reports that the RIAA wants royalties from radio stations. 70 years ago Congress exempted radio stations from paying royalties to performers and labels because radio helps sell music. But since the labels that make up the RIAA are not getting the cash they desire through sales of CDs, and since Internet and satellite broadcasters are forced to cough up cash to their racket, now the RIAA wants terrestrial radio to pay up as well."
It may or may not work here, but in most of the world radio pays a performance right, so it is very well accepted internationally.
Nice idea in theory but in practice I just don't think it will work like that. Here in the UK Radio Stations already pay the record companies for what they play and you will find that most of them do exactly what you describe above, i.e play the same crap the labels spoon feed them over and over again.
There are maybe a couple of hours each week when it possible to hear some decent music on the radio here but other than that you may as well forget it.
A long time ago my father (a construction worker) told me why you didn't see many houses made out of brick in California. Seems the bricklayer's union became way, way too successful and powerful, demanding more and more pay up to the point where people couldn't afford brick construction any more and moved to frame and plasterboard houses with tar shingle roofs (this was back in the early 50's). Basically they priced themselves out of the market, but they couldn't roll back their demands due to the nature of the organisation, and their leaders chose economic death over political death as an organisation because people are funny that way.
As Hawkeye once said, the operation was a success but the patient died.
Funny thing though, the frame houses seemed to flex a bit but the brick houses tended to rubble during earthquakes, lovely Aesopian message there.
Off-topic? No, just a very extended metaphor. The RIAA will eventually have absolute control over a commodity that absolutely nobody will buy. And when they start annoying Congressmen more than their lobbyists are worth by stepping outside the bounds of their anointed playing field, they're going to get slapped down hard. Nobody has a right to make money, the market has to be there, and RIAA is killing the goose.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The RIAA's member labels already collect royalties for songs played on the radio. Radio is not exempt from those royalties - in fact, they usually make up the majority of the income a recording produces, now that songs get played over and over, forever, in our pop/classic corporate "rock" broadcast culture.
Those "performance" royalties are collected by whichever agency represents an artist who wrote the songs: BMI, ASCAP are the biggest, the remaining <10% of artists are represented by a couple of "big little" agencies, and then a bunch of really little ones. But those agencies are at least as corrupt as the record labels which collect sales income, then find every excuse to count "expenses" before returning the minimum (if any) share of "profit" to the artists who made the record. Very little of the performance royalty is paid to the artists, and the return to them is pretty random.
This formula is also worked against the rounding effect of the sampling for determining royalty payments: either one "representative" hour a day, or one "representative" day a week is usually used, which of course means only the most popular artists have a chance of registering in a sample and getting paid. Since the most popular artists get played so much more (the same goddamn song, year after year, too), only the biggest artists get cut in. To make it even worse, the distribution of top artists in the "random" sample is used to divide the royalty collected from radio stations which pay a subscription fee as if they're playing every artist. So in effect those biggest artists are collecting the share of the littler artists who do get played, but who get rounded down. Those "rarities" and "from the vault's back wall" bands they're playing to keep you listening to the classic rock station so it sounds "fresh", with occasional "new" (30 year old) songs, all get lost in the rounding down of the sampling process. So their most valuable songs return the least share of the royalties to their artists.
And of course the BMI/ASCAP/etc collection agencies just underreport plays and percentages to the artists. I have friends in bands which registered half their artists with BMI, the other half with ASCAP, to see which paid better. For some bands BMI paid their half more, for other bands ASCAP paid their half more, sometimes 5-10x different, when they should all have paid the same. Then, since artists are flaky and move around & disappear on benders (or OD), the agencies often collect money they "don't know how to pay", so they just keep it. This also happens whenever there's the slightest possibility that a contract disagreement or unknown might allow different interpretations of how much should go in the check.
All of those scams are also fed back into the radio station's decicisions of how much to play (and promote) which songs. Since there's money attached, money gets spent on those deciders to influence which songs are played when. And to influence which "random" hour/day is picked to report who gets how much.
So now the RIAA wants to get in on the act. And of course they'll charge (mostly independent) streaming radio station even more than they charge (nearly all corporate) broadcast radio stations. Right when the Copyright Office has just rocketed already insane streaming royalties through the roof, threatening the entire noncommercial and small webcaster industry segments.
Broadcast radio already sucks worse than ever. Streaming was the only hope for people to escape the corporate noose in realtime and archived media delivery. Right as streaming was starting to get a hold in video, presenting an on-demand P2P (or communities small to large) world of all media, both kinds of royalties got jacked up to destroy the free publishers. Right as cameraphones also have the bandwidth (and caches) to play streaming radio, and even upload "news from the street", the media mainstream corporate got yet another life extension from the government, killing
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make install -not war
They already pay fees to play this music. Ever heard of ASCAP and BMI? That's why indie radio stations can't play commercial artists. Radio stations already pay to play, and now the RIAA wants royalties on top of licensing fees?
What's the difference, someone point it out to me, please!
My Babylon