What do songwriters think about the CRB and mechanical rates? [Trichordist survey results]

Songwriters are on the verge of a 32% increase in mechanical royalties plus inflation indexing. But is that the increase they expected, and do they think the process is fair? The Trichordst surveyed songwriters to find out.

from the The Trichordist

Many readers participated in the Physical and Download Mechanical Rates Survey that various organizations have sent to their members over the last few weeks. Here are the results of the main questions for which we had 361 respondents who self-selected their participation. (Other answers included comments which we chose not to publish for privacy reasons.). 

The results suggest that participants were mostly informed songwriters who had never been asked before what they thought about the issues in the Copyright Royalty Board. We would have to conclude that any of our regular readers would be a bit skewed toward knowledgeable because between the Trichordist, MusicTechPolicy, ARW, Hypebot and Celebrity Access we were probably carrying a very high percentage of the available information on the frozen mechanicals issues.

It also is striking how few respondents said they had ever been asked what they think about any mechanical rates (physical, download, streaming), an important and easily measurable issue. This is something to add to the learning from this episode. It may be that our data is skewed, but even so we didn’t expect that 68% would say they’d never even been asked their opinion. An easy way to find out what people think about something is to ask them.