Does Radio Promote the Music or Does the Music Promote Radio?

[Corned Beef and Cabbage]

The debate continues over the justification for increased royalties...

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2007/12/19/legislators_propose_new_royalties_for_big_radio/

 

[davideduardo]

The debate continues over the justification for increased royalties...

Since non-live contemporary music radio really started (late 40's to early 50's after the AFM issues were mostly resolved) record companies have spent billions upon billions to get radio to spin their records. No, it seems, the record companies want it all back.

Thing of the huge and expensive promotion staffs, independent promoters, the travel, entertainment, product give-aways, cost of promo mailings and copies, ads in the trades, from Cash Box to R&R, free appearances for stations of artists, and, of course, the legendary gifts that got Alan Freed and others indicted.

And this is all because the record companies lost sight of how the consumer wants to purchase and use music. The latest idiocy is the withdrawal or threatened withdrawal of major labels from iTunes because "we don't want Jobs to control the industry" despite the fact that iTunes is how music buyers want to get their music. Damn the consumer, we can't let Jobs be any more important than we are...

What an incredibly Luddite and idiotic attitude.

 

[SirRoxalot]

Do You Hear What I Hear?

If an artist plays in the forest, and nobody's there to hear them, do they still get a royalty?

If this idiocy goes through, the rich - who initially signed bad contracts just to get their music on the radio - will get richer, and the schmoes who have never been big on radio playlists in the first place will get nothing.

Artists and groups who became stars because of radio generally had to fight like Hell to gain control of their own music and escape brutally one-sided contracts contracts from the recording companies. The lever that they had to make it possible to take on the recording companies was from huge sales numbers generated by radio airplay.

If radio airplay is so insignificant in the "starmaker machine", why did the recording companies spend so much money (legally and illegally) to get their music on the radio? musicFIRST needs to go after the recording companies' contract practices, not radio.

 

[jackandcoke]

If this legislation passes--and it has a good chance of doing so, given how Big Media has been effectively demonized in recent years--look for thousands of FM radio stations to convert to talk programming.

Not all of them. But thousands of them.

Some of it will come from overreaction to the real costs of the new royalty. Some of it will come in response to a combination of the royalties + a sense that music fans are abandoning FM a little faster than they really are. And some of it will come as the royalty issue serves as the final push they needed to move into the best format opportunity in their respective market. (There are still plenty of broadcasters around firmly convinced that talk is for AM... music is for FM).

Frankly, the greatest erosion in FM listening has come on the young end--below age 25--where most new music gets bought & sold--so those stations (rockers, CHR, urban, rhythmic) might be smart to bail, anyway. A lot of their listeners really have already left.

But if the music industry does succeed in chasing the last of the "new music" radio stations away--and (largely) turns radio into a non-music medium--I'll suggest that they will have succeeded in shooting themselves in the proverbial foot... and unnecessarily causing enormous upheaval in their own industry.

 

[AntronX]

You know, the big recording industry of America does not own every single piece of music made. They sure want to act like they do, but they don't. Why not just dump the music licensed by those who want higher royalty rates and play small or independent artist's music that is not owned by the big music machine. Let's say there is an artist in your town unsigned and wants to get his/her music on the air. If it fits the station's format and sounds good, let that artist sign a contract with the station agreeing to allow that station to play that recording for a period of x years for either free or a small royalty paid directly to that artist. Big fat greedy labels need a lesson like that.

 

[flashback]

in 1978 procter and bergman (half of the firesign theater)put a comedy album out with a cut satirizing top 40 radio .they had a jingle "top pop radio. if the records wern`t free ,we`d be all news".

 

[oaktree]

If an artist plays in the forest, and nobody's there to hear them, do they still get a royalty?

No, not as of yet. It's Icoming.

But the composer and publisher will ... whether the song is played or not. That's why you pay ASCAP and BMI every year...billions of of dollars through radio.

 

[davideduardo]

If an artist plays in the forest, and nobody's there to hear them, do they still get a royalty?

No, not as of yet. It's Icoming.

But the composer and publisher will ... whether the song is played or not. That's why you pay ASCAP and BMI every year...billions of of dollars through radio.

Actually, it is quite a bit less. Radio billings are about $21 billion, and things like sports revenue and such are excluded. Overall, less than 2.5% of radio billings, or around $500 million goes to ASCAP, SESAC and BMI from radio.

 

[dbdigital]

The debate continues over the justification for increased royalties...

Since non-live contemporary music radio really started (late 40's to early 50's after the AFM issues were mostly resolved) record companies have spent billions upon billions to get radio to spin their records. No, it seems, the record companies want it all back.

Thing of the huge and expensive promotion staffs, independent promoters, the travel, entertainment, product give-aways, cost of promo mailings and copies, ads in the trades, from Cash Box to R&R, free appearances for stations of artists, and, of course, the legendary gifts that got Alan Freed and others indicted.

And this is all because the record companies lost sight of how the consumer wants to purchase and use music. The latest idiocy is the withdrawal or threatened withdrawal of major labels from iTunes because "we don't want Jobs to control the industry" despite the fact that iTunes is how music buyers want to get their music. Damn the consumer, we can't let Jobs be any more important than we are...

What an incredibly Luddite and idiotic attitude.

I can't believe I'm agreeing with you again. The entertainment industry should kiss the ground Steve Jobs walks on...and that includes Jeff Zucker at NBC.

Between weeping and gnashing their teeth over lost CD and DVD sales and panhandling Congress for special bills to extract more royalties from radio, the success of the iTunes Store has been the one bright spot in the industry's miserable existence.

Jobs has taken a practice that has been especially troubling to the entertainment industry, namely downloading content, and made it cool to actually pay for the privilege.

And talk about a sweet deal for these companies. No manufacturing, no warehousing, no multiple distribution points, no physical deliverables, just data on a server that is continually downloaded. Each click of the mouse is a "ka-ching" in the bank accounts of these companies and for content that, in most cases, they've long ago paid for and made money on.

And now the industry wants to give iTunes a kick in the pants because they aren't making enough when, in fact, it's been shown that, on a per song basis, record companies actually make more through iTunes then from selling CDs.

The entertainment industry deserves no sympathy from the public and especially not from Congress. And if Zucker thinks that NBC can do better by taking their content off the iTunes Store and putting it on some joke called Hulu, then he has his head firmly planted where the sun don't shine.

db

 

[tomservo]

The entertainment industry deserves no sympathy from the public and especially not from Congress. And if Zucker thinks that NBC can do better by taking their content off the iTunes Store and putting it on some joke called Hulu, then he has his head firmly planted where the sun don't shine.

Until Apple breaks the monopoly between iPods and iTunes, expect to see more of this happen. I don't have a copy of iTunes and own no iPod, but I do have another mp3 player. By all accounts, I can't download and sync their music... At least not DRM-encoded tracks. (Even though my player supports DRM, it doesn't support the proprietary Apple-DRM that is unique to iTunes and iPod players.)

It's funny how Microsoft bundles IE with Windows and people cry "monopoly" yet Apple forces iTunes users to have iPods and it's "innovation". The same goes with their garbage iPhone, locked to one carrier, locked to their approved apps and locked to their iTunes service. The only one with his head firmly planted where the sun don't shine is Steve Jobs.

Imagine if your local radio station was like Apple. You'd have to buy a special radio just to listen. Sure, it can tune the whole AM/FM dial, but only it can decode your special broadcasts. Other radios, some more innovative and a lot cheaper, can tune the other stations but not yours.

 

[dbdigital]

The entertainment industry deserves no sympathy from the public and especially not from Congress. And if Zucker thinks that NBC can do better by taking their content off the iTunes Store and putting it on some joke called Hulu, then he has his head firmly planted where the sun don't shine.

Until Apple breaks the monopoly between iPods and iTunes, expect to see more of this happen. I don't have a copy of iTunes and own no iPod, but I do have another mp3 player. By all accounts, I can't download and sync their music... At least not DRM-encoded tracks. (Even though my player supports DRM, it doesn't support the proprietary Apple-DRM that is unique to iTunes and iPod players.)

It's funny how Microsoft bundles IE with Windows and people cry "monopoly" yet Apple forces iTunes users to have iPods and it's "innovation". The same goes with their garbage iPhone, locked to one carrier, locked to their approved apps and locked to their iTunes service. The only one with his head firmly planted where the sun don't shine is Steve Jobs.

Imagine if your local radio station was like Apple. You'd have to buy a special radio just to listen. Sure, it can tune the whole AM/FM dial, but only it can decode your special broadcasts. Other radios, some more innovative and a lot cheaper, can tune the other stations but not yours.

Steve Jobs has long argued against DRM, a condition that was placed upon Apple by the record companies for the privilege of selling their music. Now that Apple offers DRM-free music and that the industry has realized that it isn't the apocalypse they thought it would be, expect to see more of it from the record companies, such as WMG.

As for the iPhone, it has long been rumored that Apple's true objective is VoIP which explains their interest in the 700 MHz band. As it is, there is already experimental software for making VoIP calls on the iPod Touch. I expect that, one day, the Apple/AT&T partnership will end. Partnering is not Apple's strong suit.

Anyway, I hope so. I'm not buying an iPhone until they do.

db