40,000 SoundExchange ‘unfound’ artists
p2pnet news | Music:- “John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange (right), gave a talk yesterday at the Harvard Law School,” says Christopher Herot’s Weblog, going on, “SoundExchange is a non-profit organization set up to collect performance royalties from digital media such as internet and satellite radio and distribute them to artists and record labels.
“Simson and SoundExchange unabashedly represent the interests of the copyright owners in maximizing their revenue, but Simson ’s talk explained the motivations of all of the stakeholders in this game and the complexities of arriving at a fair level of compensation in what is essentially a political process.
“Simson traced the history of music copyrights from 1848 when French composer Ernest Bourget heard his music being played in a nightclub and refused to pay for his dinner. The court ruled that he did need to pay, but so also did the café owner, leading to the founding of SACEM and 150 years of legislation and litigation as the recording industry and later radio, television, and the internet created new ways for people to obtain and listen to music.”
SoundExchange is an unabashed former RIAA outfit which supposedly exists to collect money for artists and labels.
The trouble is: it doesn’t appear to be too successful, at least as far as the artists are concerned, not seeming to know who or where many of its clients, if they can be called that, are.
Nashville entertainment lawyer and p2pnet correspondent Fred Wilhelms has a few thoughtful observations to make on Simson and his Harvard lecture >>>
There are some pretty remarkable things in there. It’s been a while since we’ve had Simson at a public podium, and it is clear that he hasn’t lost his touch for dissembling.
First of all, there’s this:
“SoundExchange brings in $140 million in revenue, of which 75% goes to the 31,000 performers they represent.”
Now, I think that the blogger got this wrong, and I have asked him to clarify it. I suspect that Simson said that 75% of the organization’s receipts are paid out as royalties to artists AND labels.
The important thing is that SX expenses appear to be running at 25% of revenue. This is substantially higher than the 20% that SX supposedly voted as a self-imposed limit on expenses (and one that would not raise eyebrows at the IRS).
The new figure does raise a question about how SX’s board could unanimously vote to fund musicFIRST when they can’t even honor the limits they set on themselves. Of course, the SX board doesn’t have to answer the question, so they can ignore it and pretend no one really noticed..
Then Simson apparently said that SX has failed to track down 40,000 other artists.
40,000 unfound artists.
Wow.
They’re paying 31,000. They are not paying 40,000, and they know the names of that 40,000, so God knows how many they miss in sampling that would increase that number.
Imagine that.
I got on their case when their “unfound artist” list constituted 20% of the artists they are supposed to pay, and people said I was doing it just to be annoying. Not paying 55% of the artists they can identify is reprehensible. The number of actual “unfound” artists is FIVE TIMES the size of the list they post on their website.
It’s probably even higher, given that they count “unfound” groups just once, regardless of the number of members, but when you admit to 40,000, how much worse can reality be?
Being unable to find 55% of the artists who have been reported after six years isn’t a long tail problem, unless the tail begins where the neck leaves off. It is either sheer incompetence or willful indifference to the charter it was given. If anyone at SX was capable of shame, this ought to provoke it.
I’m not holding my breath.
But on the other hand, can you imagine how much worse their performance would be if we didn’t know how hard Mr. Dick Huey is working within SX to improve things? After all, that’s what he promised he would do when he finally admitted he wasn’t going to keep the promise he made to answer any question put to him.
It would appear, however, that Mr. Huey isn’t getting much help, if any at all.
Isn’t it time that SoundExchange give up the pretense that they want to pay artists at all?
Oh. Did I mention sampling?
So did Mr. Simson, even though the SX website continues to pretend it doesn’t really happen. Check their website. They never mention they sample.
Mr. Simson revealed that when SoundExchange compared the results of using the sampling done by ASCAP and BMI to getting actual census data, they found that the sampling method missed 41% of the artists and 26% of the titles.
Wow. Again.
41% percent of artists missed in the samples.
26% of the titles missed.
Boy. If 59% is a passing grade in the “good enough for commerce” category,
Bear Stearns would still be in business.
So, we’ve got a collective entity that can’t be bothered to pay 55% of the artists it knows about, and untold tens of thousands it can’t identify. And it appears that the folks who ostensibly know best about sampling of musical performances only get 3 out of 5 artists identified, and 3 out of 4 songs.
Tomorrow’s got to be better for artists, because it really doesn’t get worse than this.
Fred Wilhelms - p2pnet
[If the corporate music industry had any ethics, Wilhelms would be its 'ethicist-in-chief,' wrote CounterPunch's Dave Marsh. Wilhelms is an entertainment attorney based in Nashville, Tennessee. You can contact him at fred.wilhelms @ gmail dot com.]
Christopher Herot’s Weblog - John Simson of SoundExchange at Harvard Law School, April 17, 2008
too successful - SoundExchange Xmas party for the needy, December 18, 2007
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