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RIAA Wants Songwriter Royalty Lowered
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA's propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the 'creators' of the music, Hollywood Reporter reports that the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the 'creators' of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt."
Aren't they supposed to be on the artists' side?
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry.
Reducing costs is good for the Industry.
Nails frontman [Trent Reznor] urges fans to steal music
"Steal it. Steal away. Steal, steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing," Reznor, who has been dubbed the Ralph Nader of the music industry, said.
Steal NIN music too? He steals he says. Read that article. Interesting.
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ROFL, oh but THEY DO!!!! the traditional RIAA contract has the artist paying for all the costs out of their royalties. essentially companys RIAA represent take an artist onboard and fund the album, making the artist pay it all out of their royalties at an inflated price as well as taking their cut of the profits, so if an artist is very lucky they might walk away not owing them money... studio's are a pit of snakes, make no mistake.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This isn't the RIAA setting any sort of internal payment policy for it's members.
This isn't even a matter of paying the artists at all.
This is a matter of the NMPA (an industry association of publishing companies representing composing artists), and the RIAA (an industry association of record labels representing performing artists) squabbling over which middle man ought to get a bigger cut of online sales.
How much either of them passes on to the artists they supposedly represent is a separate issue.
And, meanwhile, the DiMA (an industry association of online music sellers) is chiming in to suggest that they both keep their prices low to speed growth in online sales while CD sales tank.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The RIAA is a trade group, and it wouldn't surprise me if they had some kind of power/influence written into all the contracts they administer to control where royalties are paid.
They do have some goals, which are not *all* related to litigation.
So you see, they do lots of things besides sue their customers.
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You should be careful about such comments. One would think you were talking about "communism" the economic model since you are comparing it to capitalism, instead of "communism" the political ideology. This is important because "communism" the political ideology generally tries to apply extreme "socialism" as economic policy and has basically nothing to do with "communism" the economic model aside from the political parties that misleadingly stole the name. This is also important because "communism" the economic model is alive and well for those who apply it to small communist cell sizes. The most common example of this would be the family unit, which comprises a communist cell by buying and selling goods and services collectively (although these cell sizes are shrinking in the US). Other applications of communism that have stood the test of time are monasteries, co-op housing, co-op stores, credit unions, municipalities, etc.
Most Americans seem to have some messed up ideas about communism and socialism, both as political ideologies and as economic models. For example, public schools are an example of socialism, although those schools seem to have failed to educate their students as to that fact. Most people with an even cursory education in economics, however, will tell you that communism, socialism, and capitalism are all present in every economy in the world and what usually leads to disaster is when an economy becomes extremist and failing to balance these aspects. Extreme capitalism is just as unstable and disastrous as extreme socialism or extreme communism... that is the lesson we all should have learned from history.
"I heard it was too complicated to do it that way. Maybe with modern computers it may be easier. It used to be that radio-stations etc. would simply[1] keep a list of each song they played and periodically handed that list over to the RIAA, who applied a set even percentage and collected corresponding fees to be distributed. It worked well for several decades. In fact, I think that patents should follow a similar technique so that you don't get slammed with surprise royalties."
Huh? The RIAA doesn't deal with terrestrial radio... that's ASCAP and BMI, who represent artists. That's the beauty of terrestrial radio royalties... it goes directly to the artists. The record companies don't see any of it.
This is exactly why the RIAA wanted to get its paws on the royalties from streaming radio. They've missed 90 years of radio royalties; thus, they successfully got the rules changed. Thus was formed SoundExchange. The artists still get much (or most) of the money, but now the record companies line up for their share, too.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
To quote from the brief:
This assumption, made by the RIAA and NMPA, that streaming is the same as selling a music track, is what triggered a whole stream of Slashdot stories about how the RIAA was trying to destroy Internet radio, such as: Webcasters Call Bunk on SoundExchange DRM Ploy.
This would have nothing to do with Apple iTunes Music Store sales of music, which are considered the electronic delivery of an album.
As a side note, I'm astonished how quickly so many otherwise intelligent Slashdot readers seem to pile up on one side or another of an issue, such as Internet Radio royalties, depending on how the winds happen to be blowing--because they fail to think for themselves. If supposedly more intelligent than average Slashdot readers are this easily manipulated, then God help us during tomorrow's Super Tuesday elections...