Singer In Grocery Store Ordered To Pay Royalties

yog writes "An assistant at a grocery store in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, was ordered by the Performing Right Society (PRS) to obtain a performer's license and to pay royalties because she was informally singing popular songs while stocking groceries. The PRS later backed down and apologized. This after the same store had turned off the radio after a warning from the PRS. We have entered an era where music is no longer an art for all to enjoy, but rather a form of private property that must be regulated and taxed like alcohol. 'Music to the ears' has become 'dollars in the bank'."

Comments

I disagree...

[Anachragnome]

"We have entered an era where music is no longer an art for all to enjoy"

It is if you make it yourself.

Use an acoustic instrument and its "Green" too.

Honestly, this needs to stop, NOW.

[theolein]

I simply cannot believe this. This insanity needs to be stopped right now. My next vote will go to the Pirate Party.

Re:The company apologized

[uuddlrlrab]

Because, obviously, if an authority like Anonymous Coward has never heard of it, it must not exist. A very smart person who probably knows a lot about this sort of thing.

Re:The radio makes senes, but not the singer

[sumdumass]

Actually, they do get royalties. Well, unless they are stealing the paint, not paying the painters, stole the building, and so on.

The big difference is that those are one time costs and are done once until years later when they need redone. They pay each time it gets done so essentially, they are paying royalties each time the work is performed. It's not really that much different from playing songs as an aid to commerce. The biggest and most obvious difference is the frequency of which is it being done. Now, that doesn't mean that someone inadvertently humming a tune while working or singing a song while doing some remedial task should have to pay, it's only when they are doing it for the purpose of keeping customers or whatever. Then it becomes just like having a live singer on site for some promotional thing. The fact that it's some hill jack stock boy instead of the original artist or some professional artist doing it is pointless when the intentions are the same.

Re:The radio makes senes, but not the singer

[debrisslider]

Yes, but you're also getting all your money up front. You went into your employment knowing the terms and conditions of payment. Royalties have been how musicians have been paid for the better part of a century, and only in the past decade have copyright issues become well-known enough by the general public for a conversation about a transition to a new model of payment to begin. Copyright used to be sane, and hardly in perpetuity, but it is not the fault of the common songwriter that large rights-owning corporations have abused the legislative process. If you change the rules midgame, that's hardly fair to the original creators.

It is impossible to determine the true profit of a song in advance. Engineers can get a lump sum up front because it is much easier to determine the objective worth of their work; with songwriting, success is mostly random. Some professional songwriters can hit on a formula that might be successful within the context of a given trend, especially with the backing of media corporations, but fashion changes quickly and there are very few who are able to be consistently successful over the long run. A piece of art is priceless, or valueless, in both senses of the word - it is simply as valuable as people are willing to pay. If you write a program or build a structure, you can estimate to a pretty fair degree how much value you'll be able to extract from it, but there is such great variance with music, even with millions in marketing backing a project, that there is no way to pay people up front. I suppose there are songwriting groups and in-house guys that can make a salary, but outside of highly commercial productions that's just not how people write music.

If current practices are unsustainable, then popular music as we know it may be unsustainable. It is hard enough to make a living as a musician now, lots of mildly successful musicians still have day jobs, but without the small amount of revenue from royalties many might just give up. Also, being a songwriter doesn't necessarily mean being a performer, or a touring artist, so you can't just say 'give your music away for free and make it up in t-shirt and ticket sales.' Sure, there are site-specific jobs like in-house composer for films and games or commercial jingles, but they are the people least likely to receive royalties anyway, having already signed away rights to their employer. You could sell rights to use your songs in advertisements, but you need a certain degree of exposure in the first place to have enough street cred to be worth associating with a product, so that money tends to go to those already successful.

Note that this isn't an issue of selling CDs - in fact, royalties from streaming sites might just be the primary source of income in the near future with the popularity of places like last.fm and Spotify. Proper allocation and collection of royalties is more important than ever these days. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater because of these jerks, we're just getting to the point that the granularity of royalties makes sense, now that actual accurate playcounts can be generated (and individual songs purchased rather than albums), resulting in fairer distribution of collected fees based on harder data than chart sales and radio playlists.