New legislation in Congress could drastically change music-industry economics. As it currently stands, musicians in the U.S. aren’t paid when their songs are played on the radio unless they wrote the songs, too. Only songwriters get radio royalties, not the folks who play and sing their tunes. Two bills moving through the House and Senate would change that, by making radio broadcasters pay royalties to musicians, too.
Radio broadcasters hate the idea of performance royalties — really, really hate it. They’re speaking up in Congress and on air.
NACA and the College Gig
How to Navigate The Educational Market
By Will Morgan
The college gig, in one respect, can be thought of as the generic store brand in the music industry supermarket – only a few people seem to be aware of it, despite its relative value. As a culture of advertising-inundated consumers, we instead reach for the big names on the shelf, or for the purposes of this example, the principal venues with established reputations. And more often than not, especially if you’re a musician, these items are beyond our means, financially and otherwise.
Finally, for the first time ever, Internet radio stations have a royalty deal that is reasonably viable and extends for a reasonably-long period of time.
The specific part of the Internet radio industry that this particular deal saves are the webcasters who are (A) larger than hobbyists — i.e., who have aspirations of earning more than $1.25 million in revenues per year — but (B) are not wholly-owned divisions of multi-billion-dollar companies (e.g., AOL & Yahoo and CBS & other terrestrial broadcast groups).
According to major label vet Ted Cohen , “the main problem centers around the minimums [that services pay labels for the use of music],” he wrote. “The economics just don’t work. A ‘mea culpa’, I was a big proponent of per-track minimum rates for both paid subscription and ad-supported services when I was at EMI. I WAS WRONG!”
Representatives from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) met with members of Congress and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to reiterate the negative impact that local airplay royalties would have on local radio stations that provide free airplay to its 235 million weekly listeners.
