Billy Corgan on Capitol Hill
Jim DeRogatis has a post about Chicago rocker and Visa spokesperson Billy Corgan speaking before Congress about the so-called Performance Rights Act, with which the music industry hopes to extract money from radio stations for playing their music.
Radio pays songwriters a “publishing” fee, but there’s no “performance” equivalent. That is, Pepsi spokesperson Bob Dylan gets a few pennies each time Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” is played on a terrestrial radio station, but the Hendrix estate gets nothing.
… nor, incidentally, does Warner Brothers, which is really what all this is about. I’m not sure how these payments would break down. I assume it’s a performance fee rather than royalty, meaning the artist might typically get half of the payments rather than a much smaller fraction. Will research and report back.
As DeRo notes, the argument against the bill is that radio sells records with all the free airplay; songwriters get hosed all sorts of ways and so deserve their pittance, but the artist on the label is the one getting all the benefits of being played on the radio.
There’s no better illustration of this than the fact that the music industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars on payola to get radio stations to play their artists.
Seems a little churlish for them now to be taking the other tack.
If Congress had vision it would fashion the payments only to the artists themselves, the people who play on the CDs, working around the labels entirely.
The dynamic that seems to be unfolding in the industry is that the RIAA is using its waning days of influence to grandfather in some payments that will artificially keep the labels alive after technological changes have passed them by entirely. Congress should pass on the idea just on that basis alone.