Dionne Warwick: ‘Fair Pay for Air Play’ About Economic Justice
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Little did the public know that when they heard Dionne Warwick sing, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and other hits on the radio for the past four decades, none of the money made off the airplay found its way to her—it all went in the radio station owners’ pockets.
Now Warwick and other performers have a chance to finally get what they are due—but Big Radio CEOs are resorting to personal attacks in an effort to derail legislation that would pay performers like Warwick when their music is played on the radio.
Writing today on the Huffington Post, Warwick says the Civil Rights for Musicians Act (H.R. 848), dubbed “Fair Pay for Air Play,”
is about economic justice for African American artists. It’s about what’s right. And it’s about time.
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.
