Moving towards Option B
Yesterday, I wrote a post commenting on the free-market, negotiate-with-the-copyright-owner option that’s hardly mentioned in news articles and editorials on the internet royalty rate battle. Well, I happened to come across a new story that shows one of these webcasters using that option.
I wrote a post yesterday commenting on an option that webcasters have to deal with the government’s increased royalty rates: Negotiate with record companies and artists directly. In my example, I called this “Option B.” I also commented that this option is hardly ever mentioned in the debate. Well, a few days ago I came across an article that not only mentions the option, but shows an example of a webcaster using it. As reported in “SoundEx touts digital royalty deal” at the Hollywood Reporter:
Some stations are taking matters into their own hands.
Smoothjazz.com, a station in Monterey, Calif., is asking artists to waive their rights to the royalty in exchange for airplay.
and…
Shore [founder of Smoothjazz] contends that stations the size of Smoothjazz that allow artists to sell CDs right off the site help the artist as much as the webcaster.
“Not one artist has said: ‘You’re trying to rip us off,’ ” she said.
It’s up to the artist to decide whether the promotional value of her station is worth forgoing the payment they’d receive through SoundExchange, she explained.
“If they want to waive so we can play them, then they do; if they don’t, they don’t,” she said. “It’s totally up to the artist.”
Here is a webcaster that is going about securing the rights to play her music the right way: by asking for permission. The exposure webcasters give to musicians they play should be used as a negotiating tool, not an excuse or a rationalization for using government power to take away the property rights of music artists.
Tags: [internet radio, webcasters]Comments
4 Responses to “Moving towards Option B”
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Hi Darren,
I for one didn’t realize that direct negotiation was an option, but as I’d commented in response to your post at http://www.appscout.com/2007/10/royalty_rates_could_mean_end_of_pandora.php I wonder how viable it would be for Pandora or Yahoo! Music to try and negotiate direct with a pool of artists as large as they have?
For a small station with a niche playlist that’s certainly a possibility and it’ll be great to see SoundExchange bypassed (and their relevance reduced) - as long as the artist doesn’t suffer over a reasonable time period.
Leaving the “Music Industry” in charge of music has only been detrimental in the last few years (just read the Universal article in the latest issue of Wired!)
Hi, thanks for your comment. I’ll reply to it and your post at appscount.com tonight or tomorrow. Sorry, it’s the busy season!
Offbeatmammal,
As I’ve said in a lot of posts, I believe that music artists should have the right to control the publication of their music, period. A law that forces artists to sell their music at a set rate - whether that rate is as high as SoundExchange wants or as low as the webcasters want - would violate that right. It would be the same as if you said: We could have great internet radio if we didn’t have to deal with negotiating with artists, so… forget what the artists want, we’re taking their music.
I think that this would make it very hard for big internet radio broadcasters to offer the same things they are offering, but it doesn’t have to be. If internet radio offers as much to artists as webcasters claim, then webcasters won’t have to come to the artists. The artists will come to the webcasters!
I think we’re basically in agreement. But if I was an internet broadcaster with a roster for even 5000 artists where we need to negotiate rates yearly as their popularity grows/wanes, their output if fresh or tired it would be a huge overhead. Then figure in thinks like the newly released classical segment where you’re dealing with orchestras potentially playing compositions of folks who died 200 years ago… who becomes the arbiter.
my preferred solution would be an independently (government?) funded (but strictly on a transparent cost recovery only basis) organization who exist simply to act as the mediator between many artists and many broadcasters - so no incentive to push the rates either way. If they do a good job then the artists and broadcasters will use them, if not they can be bypassed for artists big enough to get the ear of a webcaster (or be worth the webcaster chasing) or SoundExchange can come back and play.
Of course many artists don’t have the luxury because their existing record company contracts have diluted their rights to the point where independent negotiation for the vast majority just can’t happen until contracts expire.
FWIW I used to work on a project where we licensed commercial music. Originally when we were small we sought out independent artists and small record labels and negotiated as you suggest - it was good for us and good for them. We also licensed some music from larger record labels. Time went by and we got bigger and had more content to fill on different mediums (we “broadcast” on TV, Web and Mobile handsets) and it was costing us more and more (both time and money) to secure deals so we had to reduce the pool of talent we supported because we couldn’t afford to do what we wanted to do - that is the only reason for my feeling that some form of mediation is needed… not for control but to help it scale without reducing choice any more than the record labels already have managed to do