I'm not sure why this article refers to iTunes because iTunes doesn't pay mechanical royalties on sales - the person/entity who owns the sound recording copyright (presumably the label who released it originally) is responsible for paying the mechanical royalty on the sales that are reported by iTunes.
iTunes pays the labels 0.70 per song and at that point it's the labels responsibility to pay the mechanical, which is 9.1 cents for a recording under 5 mins or 1.75 cents per minute, which ever is higher. Where this gets interesting is for the really long songs, I've seen mechanical rates over 0.30 per song, which is why you don't see long songs over 10 minutes on iTunes. The labels just don't want to deal with them unless they negotiate a lower rate.
So beyond the fact that talking about Apple + iTunes gets people all hot and bothered, this has nothing to do with iTunes directly.
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I'm not sure why this article refers to iTunes because iTunes doesn't pay mechanical royalties on sales - the person/entity who owns the sound recording copyright (presumably the label who released it originally) is responsible for paying the mechanical royalty on the sales that are reported by iTunes.
iTunes pays the labels 0.70 per song and at that point it's the labels responsibility to pay the mechanical, which is 9.1 cents for a recording under 5 mins or 1.75 cents per minute, which ever is higher. Where this gets interesting is for the really long songs, I've seen mechanical rates over 0.30 per song, which is why you don't see long songs over 10 minutes on iTunes. The labels just don't want to deal with them unless they negotiate a lower rate.
So beyond the fact that talking about Apple + iTunes gets people all hot and bothered, this has nothing to do with iTunes directly.