Performance tax on music broadcasting

[smoothmoniker]

That link is so crufty that I almost can't stand to read it. It's jingoist (them FOREIGN peoples are taking our money!), populist in the worst way (those record company fat cats already make enough money!) and it is filled with red hearings (the money won't go to artists, it will go to record companies - well who the hell do they think paid for those recording sessions in the first place! The record companies that the starving artists SIGNED A CONTRACT WITH!), and full of misdirection (local radio? there is no local radio).

Uggh

I'm not in favor of a tax on radio stations - anything that runs through DC is a bad idea.

I AM in favor of a statutory license paid to performers for the use of their music on radio stations. Currently, performers are not compensated in any way when their work is played on radio, only songwriters.

I know your mind immediately goes to the big top 40 names, and the response is, "Who cares! They make their money from touring and album sales, and all good artists write their own music anyway." Consider for a minute how this really works, though.

A classical musician records a brilliant interpretation of a Beethoven piano sonata. Because the song is in the public domain, the radio station doesn't have to pay a songwriter. Because the performer has no rights over the broadcast of their own recording, the station doesn't have to compensate them, either. The radio station gets to distribute a product without compensating the person who produced that product.

The purpose of the exemption (and it is an EXEMPTION to the copyright law, not standard practice) was to lower the cost for new radio stations to begin broadcasting, back when radio was a new technology. Congress decided that the public was better served by sheltering the fledgling new technology from some of the costs of doing business, in order to help it become better established.

Well, radio is established. The experiment worked. Does it really need the continued protection of congress to subsidize the cost of doing business at the expense of the musicians who create the product it distributes?

Take a look at the organization behind this - it's an industry lobby group, the same lobbying group that tried to block satellite radio, has sued to block the approval of low-powered FM devices, and lobbied strongly against the release of "white spaces" in the bandwidth for wireless broadband and other new uses. It's a protectionist group, not some sort of local groundswell advocacy group.

Uggggh. The NAB. Put them right up there with the RIAA. They both suck.

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

I AM in favor of a statutory license paid to performers for the use of their music on radio stations. Currently, performers are not compensated in any way when their work is played on radio

I don't disagree... but how do you see this working? Would you imagine some kind of ASCAP/BMI clearinghouse for the performers? What about performers who did the recording as straight work for hire? For that matter what about the engineers etc.? How is this different (or should it be?) from the software industry--the coders who wrote Office 2007 don't get residuals on it.

Maybe the NAB and the RIAA will sue each other out of existence . . .