Performers Call for Fairness in Radio

by James Parks, Mar 4, 2009

Sheryl Crow, shown performing at one of President Obama’s inaugural balls, was back in Washington recently to lobby for performance rights for musicians and singers.

Frank Sinatra couldn’t get them. Dionne Warwick hasn’t gotten them in nearly 50 years, and Sheryl Crow and Herbie Hancock still can’t get them. For more than four decades, musicians and singers have been trying to get royalties, also known as performance rights, for music their fans listen to every day on the radio.

Here’s the deal. If music you perform is played on satellite radio, streamed on the Internet or piped in through cable TV music channels, you get paid a royalty. But due to a loophole in copyright law, if the music is played on FM or AM radio, only the composer gets a royalty and the performer gets nothing. The United States is one of only a few countries that do not provide fair performance rights on radio. The others include Qatar, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and China. 

Actually, U.S. performers get stiffed from royalties twice. Because U.S. radio stations do not pay a performance royalty for foreign artists either, American artists are not compensated when their music is played on stations around the world.

Yesterday, more than 90 members of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) from across the country met with members of Congress from their home states to call for full performance rights in sound recordings broadcast over AM/FM radio. They asked lawmakers to support the Performance Rights Act (H.R. 848 and S.379), which if enacted would bring the United States in line with almost every other nation in the world. 

Urge your lawmaker to support the Performance Rights Act here.

AFM President Thomas Lee says:

This piece of legislation is crucial to all musicians, and now is the time for passage.  We urge Congress to make the Performance Rights Act a top priority this session.

The bill was introduced by the chairmen of the Judiciary committees in the Senate and House, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). In the House, six committee chairmen and women have signed on as co-sponsors.

AFTRA National Executive Director Kim Roberts Hedgpeth adds:

Establishing a performance right in U.S. copyright law will set the stage to repatriate millions of dollars now held by foreign collecting societies back into the U.S. for the benefit of our ailing economy. We ask all those who support the bill to reach out to their representatives and senators and urge them to vote in favor of the Performance Rights Act.

Last year, the AFL-CIO Executive Council called for passage of the legislation, saying:

In this time of business and technological transformation in the music industry, the longstanding injustice of unequal copyright treatment for sound recordings should be corrected. The AFL-CIO calls for the swift enactment of the Performance Rights Act. There is no doubt that all recording artists—royalty artists and session performers—create works of great value. It is only fair that they share in the revenues generated by their hard work and talent.

Click here to read the Executive Council resolution.

Last week, artists and musicians, including Sheryl Crow, will.i.am, Herbie Hancock, Emmylou Harris, Patti LaBelle, Matt Maher, Los Tigres del Norte and Dionne Warwick, joined members of Congress to launch the effort to pass the legislation. Citing the dismal human rights records of the other countries that deny performance rights, Crow told a Capitol Hill news conference the United States is not in “spectacular company when it comes to protecting artists.”  

Hancock pointed out that AM/FM radio is a $16 billion business and the performers get “not one penny” of that revenue. He said people tune in to the radio because of the music.

People deserve to be paid when somebody else uses their property. Just as radio promotes music, music promotes radio.

Click here to see clips from the press conference.

Jennifer Bendell, executive director of the musicFIRST Coalition, a coalition of artists and organizations who support fair pay for artists, said:

It’s unfair, unjustified and un-American that artists and musicians are paid absolutely nothing when their recordings are played on AM and FM radio. Music is their work, their livelihood. They deserve to be compensated when their music is played on the air.

At the kickoff press conference, Warwick summed up the issue this way— after saying she hasn’t been paid once while her songs played on the radio around the world for 48 years:

I think now it’s about time that I do get paid.

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