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.
Public radio stations, which is where most classical music lives, will pay a lower fee than commercial stations if the act passes. I’m not exactly sure why — maybe it’s because they are not-for-profit organizations and are not using the artists’ work to get advertising.
I sympathize 100% with artists who believe they should get paid royalties when their music is played on the radio. I work for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and our musicians get a broadcast fee when we play their live performances on the radio. They stayed off the air for five years rather than allow stations to play their live music for free, but they get nothing when we play their CDs on the air.
Incidentally, very few orchestras can afford to pay their musicians broadcast fees, which is why you don’t hear many American orchestras on the air. Next year it’s going to get worse. I’ve already heard of two major orchestras that have lost their broadcast funding for next year.
With the Performance Tax, musicians would get paid every time a station plays their music. Sounds great, right? Finally, the musicians will be getting paid for their work and they won’t have to live in poverty anymore.
If you believe that, I have some Credit Default Swaps I’d like to sell you.
I have been fighting for musicians to get paid a fair wage and good benefits all my life. But I don’t trust that the money from this tax will actually get to them. Supposedly they get 45% of these payments, but I think about the logistics of paying them. Will every member of an orchestra get a tenth of a cent when a station plays a three minute piece of theirs? How much will each member get if a station plays a one-hour Mahler symphony? Will the money go to the orchestra management instead? What if it’s an older recording? Are you going to track down every member who played on that recording? Are you going to expect the orchestra management to find them and pay them, and if so, who pays for that administrative time?
The reporting that stations have had to do for BMI and ASCAP has been burdensome over the years and wildly inaccurate. In classical music it’s almost nonsensical, because stations play so little music by living composers who are the only ones who really benefit from BMI and ASCAP royalties.
The stations may only pay $1,000 or $5,000 a year for Performance Rights, but the logistics of getting the money from the stations to the musicians sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. It’s a financial burden on stations, and it’s unnecessarily complicated. I see a whole string of middlemen standing there with their hands out: regulators, record companies, salespeople, station managers, artists’ managers, Performance Rights administrators.
If an artist is good, the radio stations will play that artist’s music a lot. He/she will sell a lot of CDs or downloads. It’s clean and everybody wins.
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The argument here is not different from Marty’s thesis in “WCLV Leading the Charge Against Onerous Royalty Payments” posted March 16, 2009.
Artists deserve to be paid for their work. The real question is how, which differs depending on the circumstances of how the listener receives the work.
Assuming artists are being paid as members of orchestras, it is fair to see broadcasts of their work as marketing of their recordings. The better the performance, the more concerts will be attended and the more CD’s and/or digital downloads will be sold. The better the organization does qua organization, the more valuable are the artists who are members of the organization and thus the more they should be paid.
I can think of no more successful recording than that of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) on Nonesuch, with the London Symphonietta, conducted by David Zinman with Dawn Upshaw. At Amazon, there are a bunch of other recordings, but this is the only one I ever hear. So, radio has pushed this recording over and over again.
So, those guys and that soprano have hit the ball out of the park.
Maybe orchestras and artists should be paying the broadcasters and streamers for pushing their product. This I believe was Marty’s argument on Mach 16, unless I read her incorrectly.
Some of us are old enough to remember the “payola” scandals when music production companies sent their people out with bags of money to give to on-air people to get them to air their products.
My how the worm has turned. The whole music industry is a mess. This is just a part of it.
Marty,
Representative Raymond Green (D-TX), author of the Local Radio Freedom Act, now has 226 (of 435) co-sponsors with some surprising crossing of party lines…
Green introduced it some time ago (10/07) but recent economic challenges make its passage especially vital.
See: http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-hc244/show
Best regards,
-Robert Ready
Burlington, VT
Thanks to both of you for your comments. As a veteran of performing arts groups and a longtime radio announcer, I can see both sides. But the performing arts groups DESPERATELY need the air time on radio. You really can’t pay for that level of promotion, Even if you could, not many classical music organizations have that kind of money.
Classical stations are broke, too. Neither side has the money to pay the other, so why don’t we leave it as it is — a mutually beneficial arrangement where everybody wins?