A blog post last week on the Future of Music Coalition site asks “which side are you on?” when it comes to the Public Performance Rights “Tax.”
There are plenty of places you can read about the issue if you Google around and follow links. There are lots of opinions out there. I’m a member of AFTRA, and my union supports the tax. I work with a lot of radio stations, and most of them don’t.
Part 2 of 3 — By Mona Seghatoleslami, West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Spring is in the air, and spring fund drives are on the air on public radio stations around the country. Stations that align their drives with nationally coordinated dates will be starting this Friday (March 28), while others have worked out their own schedules that fall close to these dates.
The Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio conference a few weeks ago dedicated an entire day to topics in fundraising, including how to fundraise in a troubled economy. Here’s a summary of what was discussed in those sessions, along with some of what I plan to do with what I learned.
Buzz about the microblogging service Twitter continues to grow, and as a user I’m increasingly seeing the fruits of its popularity. I signed up with Twitter early on, but I didn’t start to use it regularly until some months ago. As more people join, the party gets livelier, and the odds of bumping into a stranger with similar interests improve. Meanwhile, people are taking advantage of Twitter’s built-in flexibility and finding increasingly clever ways to use it.
For people in media, this means now is a great time to enter the Twitterverse and connect with audiences. Perhaps more importantly, you can also connect members of your audience with each other.
When people buy CDs, the record companies and the licensing companies are supposed to pay royalties to the artists. In addition, radio stations pay blanket license fees to BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC to air CDs, money that is supposed to end up in the artists’ pockets. But now, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is trying to levy a new performance tax on radio stations, and Congress is currently debating the issue. WCLV in Cleveland is asking its listeners to write to their members of Congress.