Music licensing. This is why it simply won't work. The people who are willing to support the artists do, and those that aren't can't be stopped in the current technical environment. If an artists tries to lock down their music with DRM, they are ostracized and no one will ever buy their work
Hank Jr. just released his new album January 15th. I have been following the truly public torrent sites to see when it arrived, and it did so today, with a ton of seeds. Three days and the world is stealing his work. He's selling this for $10 on iTunes and Amazon Music. A reasonable price for some quality music.
How can we expect artists to go on creating quality new music if people can't even drop $5-$10 for a CD of stuff they want to listen to? Why are ethics so low that an artist's work is considered to be free for the taking?
but it would be riddled with economic politics and the forum masters frown on non radio political discussion.
Wonderfully stated, wdcx!
This has been happening since the beginning of recorded sound.
Edison himself make copies of his own companies recordings by coupling the horns of a recorder to a player to convert his wax cylinder recordings to disc format. He didn't even believe it was necessary to have the performers names on the record. He eventually gave in on this.
I have an AudioDiscs home recording book from the late 1940's (cutting records at home was common before tape came along -- I inherited then restored my grandparents Recordio machine -- I can cut my own 78 rpm records --) In this book it shows how to connect two units together to play the song on a commercial record on one machine while recording it to a blank disc on the other machine.
The Recordio also contains a radio that lets you record right off the air, the manual of which says how you can save money by recording your favorite songs off the air to your very inexpensive blanks discs.
People recorded off the air, and duplicated albums with reel to reels, 8 tracks, and cassettes. Did you know the cost of blank cassettes and music CD's includes a small fee or tax if you will, that goes to the music industry to help compensate for home recording? That's why, when CD burning was new they sold blank CD's specifically marked for music recording! Sales of those generated fees to the industry. People quickly figured out the cheaper data CD's worked just fine for music too. I once belonged to several tape swapping mailing lists, where we made mix tapes and sent them around to members to copy -- we all amassed quite a collection of sound.
Booking Hank Jr. for a concert STARTS at $100,000 and goes up from there. He presently has 4 tour dates listed on his web site, so that's a minimum of $400,000 for four concerts. Taking into account these are large venues he's probably taking in more than his minimum of $100,000 a night, so that's half a mil for four nights work. Many of those in attendance will have "stolen" his music online.
Taylor Swift requires 1 million and up PER concert. Luke Bryan gets $250-400,000 per show. So does Blake Shelton.
None of these people seem to have too much trouble paying their bills.
Every one of these artists can be listened to on the radio for free by the masses. Billions of songs are heard free by millions of people every day.
And yet Part 15 people insist they should never have to pay for any music rights 😉
I don't encourage "pirating" but I don't get too excited about it. The digital music industry did roughly 12 BILLION in sales for 2015, in downloads alone. People still bought CD's not in that figure and vinyl albums sold several million dollars worth.
That's not bad considering the bulk of that music sold is computer generated pop/rap/hiphop crap. When you consider most of this music is written by the same people and generated to a specific formula specifically to generate sales.
A very eye opening article is here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/hit-charade/403192/
Although I've read many similar stories over the years.
Remember, 100+ years ago the sales of recorded music was not a factor yet thousands of composers and musicians made darn good livings.
FWIW I'm a Hank Jr. fan and bought the CD via iTunes download the day I got the email from Hank that it was released.
TIB
The article linked by Tim is very interesting... for me... not having known about the song writers behind the scene.
It reminds me of what I learned a few years ago in the "forgotten history of music and radio"...
Early radio networks and stations employed live musicians and when stations got the idea of replacing their staff orchestras with phonograph records the musician's union went wild and battle-lines were formed.
The outcome was that turntable operators were required to join the musician's union.
That's why today, if you play vinyl records on your station, you are a musician.
Here's the way I look at things.
If people are willing (and stupid enough?) to pay these musicians huge amounts of money just to hear them lip sync, then that's their problem.
Song writers and performers do own the rights to their songs and performances respectively, and again, if people want to 'own' them, then they deserve to be paid. The quality (or lack thereof) of the songs doesn't matter. Again, if people want to pay for crap...
The only problem I have is with the stupid copyright laws, which have been gradually changed to effectively stop virtually anything from entering the public domain well beyond when these songs and performances will have any interest to the listening public. And it's not the writers and performers that are benefiting (for the most part), but the corporate bigwigs. Most artists see very little of that money.
The whole point of the public domain designation is to ensure that the masses can get access to artistic works a reasonable time after the artists have been paid for their work. The times in the laws now are no longer reasonable.
Okay lets get real here, first off, the music files available as torrents or supposed ringtone download sites are not top quality files, some are .flac most are MP3s at varying bit rates, from 128 to 320kbps using cheap equipment to transcode from CDs.
Are we all so young that we have forgotten how music was distributed to the media years ago, like the 1970's perhaps?
If so, let me educate you, "PROMTIONAL COPY NOT FOR SALE" means just that, PROMOTIONAL COPY and NOT FOR SALE means just that.
Years ago, record companies distributed their vinyl records to the RADIO stations and television stations across the globe for FREE!!!! The play time on air is what got the buying public out to the record stores to purchase a copy of that single or long play record. Without exposure, who the hell would know that song even existed!!!
Radio stations even gave away LPs or 45s as prizes. Those were clearly marked PROMTIONAL COPY NOT FOR SALE.
I have rarely seen a CD marked like that in recent years....if at all!
Now, in order to PLAY even a 2 second portion of a song, you need a license or prior written permission to use that song!
Videos are blocked or removed from youtube just for a mere few seconds of a copy-righted song appearing in it, who the hell is going to be happy with 2 seconds of a song on youtube in your music collection? But guess what? The RIAA still orders youtube to either block the USA from viewing that video, or has it removed entirely.
Again, in years long gone by, recordings were leased to broadcast stations free of charge as promotional copies, for the purpose of exposing that music to the public.
Haven't you ever heard of the stories of the bands who brought their 45 RPM single to a local radio station such as WNBC 660KHz New York City's clear channel station (Now WFAN), who agreed to play it and guess what? Soon after, the song became popular! Many bands were discovered this way, read the history.
This is no longer the case here now as greed has prevailed here in the music industry like it has in everything else in this God foresaken screwed up money hungry country.
Bruce.
Well, we still get the music for free initially... Most come via CDX anymore. Very rarely does anything come specially labeled.
(Nearly all singles are distributed Digitally to radio stations either directly from the record label or from a music service. I have yet to run into one that makes you pay.)
mighty1650 Said:
(Nearly all singles are distributed Digitally to radio stations either directly from the record label or from a music service. I have yet to run into one that makes you pay.)
MrBruce said:
Why the music licensing fees? What is the title of this topic?
Not only is streaming forced to pay music licensing fees, but am I wrong to say so do broadcasters of terrestrial broadcasting?
Bruce.
I've never understood us paying them either. Once upon a time they PAID US.
mighty1650 Said:
I've never understood us paying them either. Once upon a time they PAID US
MrBruce Said:
Two Thumbs up on that statement!
Bruce.
Back when the record companies paid US, it was payola. Many lost their jobs. You can legally be paid to play a song, but FCC rules require you to identify that you're getting paid to play it to avoid misleading people into believing a song is popular when in fact it's really a commercial. Of course this doesn't apply to Part 15, you can charge them all you want. But remember, in this case you're charging the label or artist, while paying the WRITER for the right to broadcast it. Heck, back during the height of the payola scandal, key DJ's were even getting writers credits on songs so they'd get a cut of the royalties as payment for playing the songs. Look at how many 50's rock and roll and R&B records list one of the writers as Alan Freed!
Yes, record companies sent free records. But we STILL paid BMI/ASCAP/SESAC to play those records on the air. My personal experience goes back to about 1973, and we were certainly paying for the rights to play the free records on the air back then! Acording to historical books on music rights, it's been going on for nearly 75 years.
Let us also remember that TERRESTRIAL RADIO pays NOTHING TO ANY RECORD COMPANY for the right to play their records on the air. ZERO. BMI/ASCAP and SESAC collect monies that go to the WRITERS of the songs. It has NOTHING to do with the RIAA, and the RIAA never sends a radio station a bill.
The reference to YouTube pulling songs is also because the ARTIST and the RECORD COMPANIES recording is being used. This is different. BTW, YouTube now has agreements in place and MOST recordings are now OK to post. There are some rules and guidelines. Depending on license arrangements, an artist or writer has the right to have their material removed from YouTube.
The reason we don't pay the record companies or artist is specifically because congress has always considered the exchange of airtime for the rights to use the performance on the air as a fair trade. This does NOT include the writers, which is why we pay organizations that pay the writers. Of course things get complicated when the performer is also the writer, but lets not split hairs for the sake of discussion.
TIB