SEARCH
Trumka—Time for Radio to Pay the Piper and All the Musicians |
|
AM and FM radio stations that broadcast songs over the air to your cars and homes have had a free ride for more than 80 years. They don’t have to pay the musicians and singers who make the music. A good deal for corporate radio, a bad deal for working musicians.
Legislation in Congress, the Performance Rights Act (S. 379 and H.R. 848), will make sure the band gets paid by requiring the stations to pay royalties to the performers whenever their work is aired. The bill, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, “would correct an injustice that has been 80 years in the making.” In a letter to the U.S. Senate urging passage of the legislation, he says the bill
would guarantee that performers whose work is played on AM/FM radio can finally secure the right to be compensated for their efforts. This is an issue of basic fairness for working families.
You can tell you lawmakers to support the bill by clicking here.
While musicians are shafted by terrestrial radio, they receive their rightfully earned royalties when their music is played over satellite, Internet and cable radio. But 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.
Also, 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.
Opponents of the bill claim that requiring AM/FM broadcasters to make fair royalty payment to the performers would cause the stations a financial hardship, especially for small and minority-owned stations. But as Trumka points out:
This argument has no basis in fact: amendments passed with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have addressed these concerns. In fact, the amendment approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee would guarantee that the smallest broadcasters would pay as little as $100 per year for the right to utilize performers’ intellectual property.
This summer, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) and the NAACP endorsed the legislation, saying it would not hurt black radio and that musicians, like all workers, deserve to be paid a fair wage.
After winning committee approval in October, the bill could come to a vote anytime and Trumka urged lawmakers to act quickly.
The American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and other performance groups have formed the Music First Coalition to mobilize in support of the legislation.
6 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
We are grouped with countries that have dictatorships (except maybe Iraq, but that will change back…eventually). What lovely company we surround ourselves with.
I recently went to on a forum that took place in Nashville with a representative from Tenn. Congressman Jim Cooper’s office.
Here my post about the event: http://nancyvanreece.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/performing-rights-act-will-it-be-law-in-2010/
While musicians are shafted by terrestrial radio, they receive their rightfully earned royalties when their music is played over satellite, Internet and cable radio.
Yes, they’re getting their ‘rightfully earned royalties’ on satellite, internet and cable radio. At the consumers expense! XM Radio raised my rate by a $1.98 a month to cover their music royalty payments. I’m cancelling my subscription at the end of the month. Most of these artists make more on one song than I earned in a lifetime of working. I don’t plan to allow them to nickel and dime me to death!
What’s next? Will they somehow monitor my home/car stereo so that every time I play their CDs I’ll be billed? Are they going to monitor my grandchildren’s MP3 players so they can bill them too? Give me a break!
I think your XM radio increase is more due to the fact that they no longer have competition in the satellite radio business, since XM and Sirius merged a few years ago.
Don’t forget: While there are quite a few artists that have made a killing in their profession over the course of many decades, there are millions more that haven’t who wrote great music and are just scrapping by. They are the ones that need this legislation to pass the most.
I got a problem with this… Who’s gonna colect & disperse the money?? ASCAP? BMI? Those people are mobsters! They stong arm collect billions of dollars a year then the people who REALLY deserve the money never get it!!! I have never (& quite possibly will never) get a single penny for my performances from these groups!! They only benifit the already-rich songwriters!! They do everything they can to avoid paying money out to us “peons” that do the hardest work - entertaining the everyday masses at your nearest restaurant or music venue!! Their excuse is that we “don’t get enough radio play….” BS!!!! They just are scratching the rich songwriter’s back, while leaving the rest of us behind!!! I say, if the government wants to really overhaul the system, they need to make ASCAP & BMI figure out a way to pay everybody their just royalties!!! Till then, I oppose ANY copyright royalties legislation. They are all designed to make the rich richer!!!
grahamsblues, if you believe that you deserve the money via royalty checks by playing/performing other musicians’ music, then you are out of your mind. You are covering their songs; you didn’t write them. Therefore, you don’t deserve a cut in royalties. If anything, you should pay royalties to the artists that wrote the songs you are performing, but since that is virtually impossible to regulate, you won’t have to worry about that (unless you put the songs you perform on CD, in which case you must acknowledge the original songwriters or face a lawsuit if you don’t). When you write your own music with the songs credited to you and acquire the necessary publishing name through ASCAP or BMI, then and only then can you receive your just royalties.