p2pnet - rss feed: SoundExchange and the missing artists
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- “SoundExchange currently represents over 3,500 record labels and over 31,000 featured artists,” p2pnet posted last Saturday, quoting the outfit, and continuing:
“The trouble is, as Nashville entertainment lawyer and p2pnet correspondent Fred Wilhelms consistently points out, the not-so-ex-RIAA outfit has an unfortunate, and on-going, tendency to ‘lose’ thousands of the artists it’s supposed to be paying.
John Simson (right) is the organisation’s front man who, apparently said that SX has failed to track down 40,000 other artists, said Wilhelms.
He went on >>>
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.
Yup.
Brandon, however, can’t.
“You can criticize SoundExchange all you want, and some of it would be deserved, but it is hard to locate some of these people,” he says in a Reader’s Write, continuing:
“Some of them may not event be registered members and others have lost touch with their record labels over the years. Believe it or not quite a few artists still haven’t heard of SoundExchange, and if they have, they often don’t understand what it’s all about and fail to register.
“A few coordinated and simple mass/viral communications could potentially take a bite out of the missing artist problem. For those of us that have the resources, it’s probably no significant effort to urge artists we come into contact with to register and/or update their contact information with SoundExchange. Directly via our services and maybe some coordinated public awareness campaigns.
“You can love or hate SoundExchange for many reasons, but we’re all drinking from the same water. While the current landscape sets us up to clash on a lot of issues, there are a few we should cooperate on.”
Is that the case?
Wilhelms doesn’t think so. In fact, it’s not even water, he responds, going on >>>
That’s Kool-Aid SoundExchange is serving.
SoundExchange doesn’t want anyone’s “cooperation” in finding artists.
Because I was publicly critical of their efforts at finding people, at a music conference in 2004, John Simson publicly challenged me to help. I guess he thought he was going to call my bluff, but I immediately accepted. (I have a hard earned, and well earned, reputation for finding artists.) For two years, Simson and his staff jerked me around, continually lying to me about having me help, then never following through.
Finally, after a newspaper article in which I was quoted again criticizing them, Simson contacted me. He said he would give me the complete list of artists they could not find. All I had to do was promise not to disclose to anyone I had the list. In other words, if my sister was on the list, I couldn’t tell her SoundExchange had money for her.
Does that sound like an organization that wants “cooperation?”
Why do you think that SoundExchange, after all this time, hasn’t engaged in those mass/viral communications you think could help solve the problem? It’s not like they don’t know the potential exists.
When they went looking for artists to support the high Internet radio royalty rates imposed by the CRB last year, they sent out multiple emails to every registered artist and included a printed plea for help with every royalty check. Yet, oddly, when it comes to finding those “unfound” artists, they haven’t asked the artists for any help, not even once. In my experience, the best way to find artists is to ask other artists. I even told SoundExchange this repeatedly, so it isn’t like they don’t know it,
And they also know that when they announced the first forfeiture of artist money back in the fall of 2006, it was primarily the work of people outside SoundExchange who publicized it and spread the word through blogs, message boards and newsgroups to find people before they lost money. In the 90 days before the deadline, nearly 1,800 names were removed from the list, and almost all of them were the result of someone OUTSIDE SoundExchange getting them registered. That worked out to be about 20 artists a day signed up.
After the deadline passed, and the public help ended for the most part, SoundExchange didn’t take up the task on itself. They went right back to the way they had always looked for “unfound” artists. In the next six months, they managed to remove all of 90 names from the “unfound” list. That’s about two artists a WEEK. I sent them more than 10 of those 90 myself, so that even undercuts that dismal performance.
And one more thing. The next time SoundExchange scheduled a forfeiture from the artist funds, they didn’t even issue a press release. They mentioned it in the small print that introduces the “unfound” list on their website. Could it be that they didn’t want to risk having another 1,800 artists “found?” If that isn’t the reason, you tell me why they kept it all a secret, and how that should encourage anyone to think they want “cooperation.”
It would be nice to think that SoundExchange wants to find artists so they can pay them, but the facts don’t back up that theory. If they don’t find the artists within three years, they get to keep the money. That would be motivation enough not to look. don’t you think?
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.
Stay tuned.
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p2pnet - SoundExchange 40,000 lost artists: more, April 26, 2008
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