AFTRA, AFM Call for ‘Fair Play for Air Play’
You can take a stand for the folks in the band today and tomorrow. Let your congressional representatives know that it’s time that radio stops stiffing musicians and recording artists and pays the piper…and the singers, guitar players, drummers, keyboardists….
When a song is played on what is known as “terrestrial radio”—the radio you receive over the air—the men and women who play and sing do not receive a single penny in royalties for the music they created. But if that same tune is played on satellite radio, streamed on the Internet or piped in through cable TV music channels, the band gets paid.
It’s Crazy That Musicians Don’t Get Paid Royalties for ‘Terrestrial Radio’
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When you hear a song on your car radio, the boombox you’ve got in your garage or some other form of what’s known as “terrestrial radio,” you probably figure the folks who made that music are getting paid. The artists who wrote the music do receive royalties for airplay, but the men and women doing the singing and playing get squadoosh, nada, nothing.
However, if that same tune is played on satellite radio, streamed on the Internet or piped in through cable TV music channels, the band gets paid.
It’s time to close that loophole in copyright law, Paul Almeida, president of the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE), told a House committee.
Performers Call for Fairness in Radio
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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.
