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Legislation Would Force Radio Stations To Pay Royalties
Major Blud writes: Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced the "Fair Play Fair Pay Act" today that would end regulations that allow terrestrial radio stations to avoid paying royalties to artists and labels. Currently, AM/FM radio stations aren't required to pay royalties to publishers and songwriters. The proposed measure requires stations that earn less than $1 million a year in revenue to pay $500 annually. For nonprofit public, college and other non-commercial broadcasters, the fee would be $100 per year. Religious and talk stations would be exempt from any payments. Larger radio companies like iHeartMedia (858 stations in the U.S.) would have to pay more.
"The current system is antiquated and broken. It pits technologies against each other, and allows certain services to get away with paying little or nothing to artists. For decades, AM/FM radio has used whatever music it wants without paying a cent to the musicians, vocalists, and labels that created it. Satellite radio has paid below market royalties for the music it uses, growing into a multibillion dollar business on the back of an illogical 'grandfathered' royalty standard that is now almost two decades old," said Congressman Nadler.
"The current system is antiquated and broken. It pits technologies against each other, and allows certain services to get away with paying little or nothing to artists. For decades, AM/FM radio has used whatever music it wants without paying a cent to the musicians, vocalists, and labels that created it. Satellite radio has paid below market royalties for the music it uses, growing into a multibillion dollar business on the back of an illogical 'grandfathered' royalty standard that is now almost two decades old," said Congressman Nadler.
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Those are licenses, not royalties. If you want an example of how to make licensing so complicated that it's incomprehensible, read up on music licensing and royalties. Licensing to ASCAP/BMI is not a royalty - it's a license. I would think that BMI/ASCAP would pay royalties as part of the license fee, but it sounds like they don't.
Someone needs to come out with a diagram of how, what, and who gets paid in the music business.
There's NOTHING in the bill that would pay artists,
only record companies.
As to the comments on ASCAP and BMI. In most cases "license fees" are another term for royalties. And in this case they are.
This is more backdoor BS by the record company shills.
'grandfathered' royalty standard that is now almost two decades old," said Congressman Nadler.
Is it just me, or is that pretty young for regulations? Do we really need to re-write the laws every five years? I'm pretty liberal, but I don't see how businesses can make any long term plans if regulations are going to shift that rapidly.
I think it's more along the lines of: Internet Radio came along and the music industry wanted them to pay royalties because "Internet" equals "One Step Away From Piracy." They wouldn't let their music near the "PiracyNet" unless they were compensated first. Fine, so the Internet Radio companies paid them. Now, however, the executives got greedier and noticed that Internet Radio was paying them while Non-Internet Radio wasn't. Greedy executives saw dollar signs and decided that this couldn't stand so they got their buddies in Congress to put forward legislation to force everyone to pay them royalties. (Oops. I mean every Radio company. The "everyone needs to pay $X a month to the music industry no matter what you do" legislation is still being ironed out.)
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It's much more efficient now. Everybody is owned by the same megacorps so there doesn't have to be any "corruption" to make sure only your artists get airtime.
I read the internet for the articles.
The flip side of the sampling is that there is some near (but not exactly) zero play bands getting far more than their share of royalties. Basically, they face a very imprecise but accurate estimate of their payout.
What principled justification would there be for excluding 'religious' and 'talk' stations from payment? One would think that any 'religious' station would either be a nonprofit or deserve to pay like any other business; and 'talk' is huge business, and presumably not a terribly heavy consumer of music.
I can take a few guesses about the pragmatic political considerations for those exemptions; but they aren't exactly complementary.
They tried that in the late 60's in Australia. So the Aust. radio stations refused to play any US pop/rock and concentrated on available UK bands That very thing allowed the local industry to air home grown tracks on radio (and TV) and I for one think it was the beginning of the early commercial Oz music. Eventually the USA licensors gave up but the re-uptake of US bands by radio stations was slow.
The other thing is that quite a few radio stations are owned by religious organizations, even though they are full commercial for the added revenue.
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Back in the days when people used to care about music charts the people who compiled them would do samplings at a number of record shops. Record labels got to know which shops they were using and sent people to them to buy every single copy of a new release, just to make sure it charted well.
Seems like the same sort of thing would be easy here. Just find one of the stations often used for sampling and bribe them to give you a few percent more plays, resulting in a big increase in royalties.
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