9 Comments

  1. The way I see it, bars, restaurants, music venues and even your friendly neighbourhood dentist pay a fee in order to play music. Much a fuss is made about online streaming websites being ordered to pay a royalty fee, and so yes, radio stations should pay a fee also.
    I thought that they already do pay, no? If their listener figures are smaller, they pay less, surely?
    Lee J.

  2. I’m not really sure where I stand on this one Lee! If internet broadcasters have to pay, then I’d say it’s only fair for their bigger, advertising endorsed cousins to foot the bill too.
    But then you look back at why they don’t. For as long as this crazy ‘you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours’ industry has been going, radio play has been accepted as the promotional vehicle for all commercial releases. Then the labels force the pigeon-holing of radio playlists to such an extent that everyone’s playing the same 40 songs… which is where we are now.
    Radio has effectively become a redundant marketing tool so labels and rights owners follow their decade-long, knee-jerk reaction protocol of what do do in the digital age… demand money or threaten legal action. It’s a little ‘backward’ thinking for my liking, and yet ANOTHER indication of the silver-fox crew with no idea about modern practices doing what they can to maximise their pension payoffs.
    I’ll sit back and watch the fun from afar. But I’ll bet you this… those *%&^s at Clear Channel will get a much sweeter licensing deal than any independent broadcaster!

  3. Let’s see how far they get if we take the music off the radio. Creators get between 2 and 3.5% of radio revenues for supplying initially all of radio’s content – CRIMINAL.
    We should have been getting 15%. Also, there are way to many stations ( because it was a very profitable business). I’m glad their monopoly is coming to an end.
    Makem PAY!!!!!!!!!!!!

  5. On the contrary, there aren’t enough radio stations. I can’t find what I want to listen to on the radio, and when I do it turns out to be a small, independent station. These smaller stations would begin to slip away, and you’d be left with top 40 only, and more commercials/talk.
    This is basically a tax. You tax things you want less of, and I don’t think the labels want less airplay.
    Radio isn’t as profitable as you think, and your ire is misplaced. The money that gets paid to an artist’s label by the radio stations isn’t getting to the artists proportionally. Artists are uneducated when it comes to revenue streams in the music industry (its legitimately confusing). When an artist is starstruck with lust for the big money, they don’t notice they could be leaving a lot on the table in negotiations.

  6. Radio’s argument for not paying PPRs to SR owners/performers is incredibly disingenuous when they say that they give artists/labels “free” promotion in exchange for the labels allowing airplay. In fact, historically, radio stations have made gazillions of dollars via radio promoters on behalf of labels engaging in payola, i.e., pay to play and if you don’t pay you don’t get played. Those 40 songs on the playlist were bought and paid for, and not by the advertisers. See: Hit Men; it’s illustrative of the point. Radio has been getting away with murder for eons, eschewing any song from any artist that could not or would not engage in payola. Indeed, there has been some progress made there. But the United States has not kept up with Europe and elsewhere in this regard, where those stations do pay public performance fees to the performing artists as well as the sound recording copyright owners for all airplay, recognizing the performing artists’ value. OTOH, some folks feel that if the Performance Rights Act is enacted, radio stations will require that any artist/label sign a waiver of those rights prior to getting airplay, unless the legislation prohibits the station from doing that. Not sure that it does.

  7. ASCAP, BMI and SESAC fees (the Performing Rights Organizations, or PROs) compensate only the writer of the song being performed, not the actual performer. (Sometimes they are the same, but more often than not, they are different.) When you love a song on the radio, do you think of who wrote it, or who performs it? In every other civilized country in the world (with the exception of China and a few others), radio pays a fee to the performer of the song. Since the US does not, there is no reciprocity, which means that US performers do not receive any revenue when radio in the UK, or France, or Australia plays their music. If this fee is enacted here, then US artists will begin getting paid for the use of their music not just on terrestrial radio here, but also in countries around the world. I think that’s a good thing.

  8. The legislation provides for fixed royalty amounts based on the station revenue — where over 75% of the radio stations nationwide would pay $5000 or less per year for all the music they play.
    It’s fair and creates uniformity across all music platforms. Why should radio get a freebie!

  9. The $64,000.00 question is IF there will actually be any flow through to the performer. The label owns the performance. If any of you that have had major deals are recouped then I applaud you but c’mon, this is the RIAA in sheep’s clothing looking for another revenue stream. Radio will only narrow playlists. Radio did receive money in “creative” ways from labels but those days are coming to an end. This all sounds wonderful but where is the fine print? I have been blessed by a fair amount of radio in the US and abroad and can tell you that radio does still influence sales. And by the way, stop fucking comparing Europe to the States. Germany (for instance) is about the size of the state of Missouri and if you have actually been there you would know most radio in Europe is government owned so citizen/taxpayers are actually paying these royalties, not privately held companies. So does anyone want to debate if citizens in the US want to pay a tax so Dionne Warwick can get her $7.00 check? Bring it.

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