musicFIRST Misleads Again
March 3rd, 2010 | 
Author: musicFIRST is at it again.
Yesterday, Dionne Warwick was in Washington trying to persuade Congress to pass the Performance Rights Act. According to Dionne, “This is a critical issue for not only those of us who have made music our careers, but for those who are trying to make a name for themselves in the business. Performers from every genre of music should be fairly compensated for their art. Thus far, radio is the only medium that fails to provide artists with fair compensation for the use of their music and we feel it is time for radio companies to join Satellite, Internet, and Cable music distributors in giving musical artists what they have worked so hard to earn.”
I’m sorry, Dionne but could we review your tax records for the past 45 years? I would suspect that a lot of money has flowed into your personal account primarily because of the FREE exposure and promotion you received from radio stations playing your songs in high rotations and on-air personalities reinforcing your brand by praising your talent. I’m sure that your contract with your record labels was designed more in their best interest than yours but that’s not radio’s fault. What all that FREE exposure on radio did for you, however, was increase audience awareness of your talent, increase your TV exposure, increase demand for your live performances and increase the fees you could demand for those performances. Seems to me that you profited nicely from all that FREE exposure.
And before someone posts the same lame comment about radio gets free use of our airwaves and we the people own the airwaves, it would be useful to remember that radio stations are granted short-term licenses to access those airwaves with the promise to operate in the public “interest, convenience and necessity”. Then, companies must invest millions of dollars in order to build their facilities, purchase the equipment, pay the electric bills (which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year), pay the personnel (on-air staff, engineers, support staff, sales people, management), pay a large
percentage of gross advertising revenues to music rights companies (BMI, ASCAP, SESAC) and pay local, state and federal taxes. If times are good and the station does a good job of serving its listeners, it can earn a nice profit. If times are tight, it can lose money even if it’s doing a good job of serving its audience. So, saying that radio gets “free” use of our airwaves is a bit misleading.
It amazes me that the artists who support musicFIRST’s efforts don’t understand that if the RIAA gets its way and forces radio to start paying for the right to play songs then fewer stations will choose to continue playing music and those stations that do continue to play music will become more selective about what they play. If a station is paying for songs, its budget will dictate that it choose the most cost-effective tunes which will be obvious hits by artists with established track records. Consequently, playlists will become even tighter. I’m not sure that’s the goal that the musicians supporting musicFIRST are trying to accomplish.
Posted in Baby Booomers, Branding, Online Media, Politics, Quality of life, Social media, Uncategorized | 
Tags: Dionne Warwick, music, musicFIRST, Performance Rights Act, PRA, radio, RIAA
“If a station is paying for songs, its budget will dictate that it choose the most cost-effective tunes which will be obvious hits by artists with established track records.”
Yeah, because you hear so much new and cutting edge music on corporate radio these days. Just pay the people who are making those profits for these stations. The artists!
Guess it depends on what one considers to be “new and cutting edge music”. My experience is that musicians and hard-core fans tend to be more in the early-adopter camp than most people. The latter group might consider Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga cutting edge while the early-adopters would consider them to be yesterday’s news.
I suspect that if one were to compare a list of the most-played artists for the most-listened-to commercial radio formats from 4 years ago with a list from today, that there would be a lot of names on today’s list who weren’t receiving airplay in 2006.
“Corporate radio” is a term which gets tossed around a lot by the RIAA. It’s the kind of rhetoric that reminds me of Fox News’ use of the term “socialized health care”. Most radio stations aren’t owned by Wall Street-driven corporations like Clear Channel so they don’t really qualify as “corporate radio”.
As for radio stations paying the artists, they already do…with FREE advertising for both the artists’ music and their brands.
The New York Times quotes NAB Joint Board Chair and Commonwealth Broadcasting CEO Steve Newberry as saying “I don’t want to be a person that is so close-minded that I won’t look for a solution. But we want to look at this so that it’s revenue-neutral for radio, but helps the record industry.” The NAB’s position is that if the other side [RIAA] has a revenue-neutral proposition, they would look at it. But NAB feels the hundreds of millions of dollars radio pays every year to songwriters and music publishers through ASCAP, BMI and SESAC are ample compensation.