RIAA, SoundExchange, Gang of Nine
p2pnet news view P2P | RIAA News:- In our [un]SoundExchange ‘Project Unfound Artist‘ update, “There are nine ‘artist representatives’ on the SoundExchange board,” said Fred Wilhelms, going on:
“All nine were invited to join the Board by the RIAA. Their absolute silence in the face of such anti-artist conduct as the failure to find and pay 40,000 artists is as clear an indictment of their complicity as anything could be.
“They have betrayed the artists they say they serve.”
Over in Germany, frequent p2pnet poster Alter_Fritz wanted to know who the nine are.
No worries, A_F. Here you go, from Fred »»»
Jay L. Cooper, Recording Artists’ Coalition
Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, AFTRA
Patricia Polach, AFM
Daryl P. Friedman - The Recording Academy
Perry Resnick, Music Manager’s Forum
Walter F. McDonough, Future of Music Coalition
Michael Hausman, Michael Hausman Artist Management
Patrick Rains, PRA Management
Jay Rosenthal, Recording Artists’ Coalition
Three managers, three lawyers, two union officers and a guy from the outfit that brings you the Grammys, says Fred, continuing:
“The union reps are there mostly to legitimize the fund that takes 5% of the royalties for session musicians and back-up singers.
“And before you say ‘Hey, there aren’t any actual artists on there!’, please take note that Michael Hausman was Aimee Mann’s boyfriend once, so I guess that counts for something. He was also the drummer for ‘Til Tuesday at the time.
“Artists did not pick these people, and artists can’t replace them. To be blunt, these folks don’t even have to talk to artists about what they do in the Board Room. The RIAA is letting them sit at the cool kids’ table, and that’s all the legitimacy they need to “represent” artists.
“To believe they are watching out for artists, you have to believe that not finding artists is good for artists, and that forfeiting artist money when they can’t find them is good for artists. And you have to believe that artists will be best served by royalty rates that drive almost all webcasters off the air. You can either believe what they say, or your own lying eyes.”
Not only but also, Fred names the names on the “other” side of the table, to wit »»»
Mitch Bainwol - RIAA
Steven M. Marks - RIAA
Alasdair McMullan - EMI
Andrea Finkelstein - Sony BMG
Michael Ostroff - UMG
Paul Robinson - WMG
Dick Huey - Matador Records
Tom Silverman - Tommy Boy Entertainment LLC
Michael Bengloff - American Association of Independent Music
He adds »»»
Two direct RIAA representatives, four (one each) from the RIAA labels, one (Dick Huey) who has proven himself a willing thug for the RIAA even though he swears he’s independent and says he’s working to change SoundExchange from the inside, even if we can’t see any evidence of that, one representative from A2IM (aka RIAA Lite), who once acknowledged on their own website that his members had to produce the artist poster children for musicFIRST, because “no one would believe Mariah Carey if she asked for more money,” and Tommy Silverman, who actually sits on the RIAA Board of Directors although his label (Tommy Boy) is no longer an actual member.
Just to complete the picture; John Simson is a former RIAA employee. SoundExchange COO Barrie Kessler is also an alumna. SoundExchange’s original counsel had been in-house at the RIAA, and the guy who replaced him last year was too.
At the same talk at Harvard where he admitted to being unable to locate 40,000 artists, John Simson insisted that SoundExchange was not controlled by the RIAA and that he was working very hard to battle the misconception. Once again, we find ourselves given the choice of believing what Simson says he is doing and believing the visible evidence of what he is actually doing. I’m sure he’s fighting just as hard as his handlers let him.
The board and executive suite population at SoundExchange is what we can expect when the government creates a monopoly and turns it over to a trade group. We get the kind of operation that serves the needs of the people running it, rather than the people it is supposed to serve.”
The first nine names in the post, “should be embarrassed that they are part of this fiasco, but clearly they are beyond embarrassment,” Wilhelms says, adding:
“They know what they are doing, and why, and for whom. There’s no other explanation for their participation.”
Jon Newton - p2pnet
.
.Stumble It!
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Wow! I hope this does not qualify as reporting by your organization - simply regurgitating the words of one seemingly disgruntled agent in the field.
SoundExchange is the one group out there that is actively seeking out artists and their heirs and creating a system to deliver funds to these people on a quarterly basis. The money they accept as a part of executing this service goes into campaigns that raise awareess about what they are doing and puts them in front of the artists that they serve. This blog post would have been better used simply to drive artists and musicians to their site so that they can get their money.
Good luck to you in future ‘reporting’.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
“SoundExchange is the one group out there that is actively seeking out artists and their heirs…”
There are no facts in evidence to support such a claim. If you can point to some facts to support your position I may well revise my own position. In the mean time Fred Wilhelms and Jon Newton have documented their positions rather well.
From my own knowledge, the RIAA exists to fix prices (in violation of US law) for music ‘product.’ The RIAA has never been about ‘artists’ and I would not expect SoundExchange to be any different.
SRG
July 16th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Matt,
Your definition of “actively seeking out artists and their heirs” must differ significantly from what most people consider “actively seeking out artists and their heirs”.
SE does indeed do some advertising of these missing artists - you may have seen their ads in Billboard, for example. And they do engage people in certain musical spheres to track folks down to get them paid. And they usually have some cheap interns at boots in various conferences. So, yes, good for them,
But to leave these enormous, obvious, 7k+ artists lists like this out there hanging - for years - when multiple people such as Fred have pointed people their way - this speaks more honestly to their ability to “actively see out artists and their heirs” and get them paid. Especially when they are sitting on uncollected millions in artist royalties, firing up musicFIRST, and throwing industry parties with Wyclef, for christs sake.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
bah - that was supposed to be “booths” in the previous post, not “boots”
July 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Matt,
I have repeatedly said that I would love to know exactly what SoundExchange is doing to find these people, because they don’t seem to be be doing what folks outside the organization are doing, which is actually finding people on the list.
If you have some information about what they are “actively” doing, please share it. If you have something more than someone at SoundExchange telling you they are doing a great job, I want to hear about it, because they really don’t talk about this part of their work, and all I have to go on is how few names come off that list without outside help.
If you think that SoundExchange found most of the 300 artists who came off the list since the Project began, I really want to know what you base that on.
Enlighten me.
Fred
July 16th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Alant,
Interns in boots or interns in booths, the results are the same. I’ve seen them, too. The Alabama State Mass Choir (on the list) could walk by the booth four abreast and the kids in the booth wouldn’t have a clue who they were. A terrible waste of resources.
Fred
July 16th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I like to think I know a lot about music of all types but there are people on that list I have never heard of EVER. I guess the scope of music that gets played out there is larger than I imagined. Lots of non U.S. artists and artists who are deceased. How do you find Sal Mineo? He died in the 70’s and has no wife or children. I can’t imagine he would have that much money. Do you spend 8 hours a day looking for him, or do you move on? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to google HAN TING-GUI and see who that is.
July 16th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Jackson,
No one could possibly know every name on that list. That is the charm and wonder of Internet radio; there’s a lot out there to find.
A couple months ago, I helped a friend identify probable Turkish artists for a targeted location campaign. I came up with about sixty names, but my friend said a third of those were actually Armenian, so they didn’t count. I am still not sure what the difference was, but my friend knew. In another case, I corresponded with a Hawaiian webcaster, who helped take a couple dozen local musicians off the list, including one who was the son of a US Senator. I know nothing about Hawaiian music, but I helped get a bunch of Hawaiian artists paid.
If you’re SoundExchange, here’s how you find who gets Sal Mineo’s royalties. On SoundExchange letterhead, you write to Doug Allen, National Executive Director of the Screen Actors Guild, the union Mineo belonged to when he was alive. You ask Allen who the Guild paid Mineo’s pension benefits to after he died. SAG won’t tell you or me as private citizens, but they’ll tell SoundExchange. SoundExchange can then make the contact.
Will Rogers is on the list. He died in a plane crash in 1935. Today I called the Will Rogers Institute. I got the number from their website. I got through to the person who coordinates the work of the Institute with the Will Rogers Company, which represents the family interests. Since they are the ones entitled to Roger’s SoundExchange royalties, the Institute contacted them for me. I hope to have Rogers off the list soon, and it took me all of ten minutes.
You and I don’t know who Hang Ting-Guo is, but there are people out there who do. If the job was easy, SoundExchange would probably be able to do it. Just because it is tough is no excuse not to do it.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Danke Schoen, Fred!
July 17th, 2008 at 6:39 am
Ok, so some SE defenders are saying that some people are obscure and hard to find. Lets say, for the sake of argument,(not that I agree) you give them a pass on Hang Ting-Guo, and others like that. How do you justify the plethora of known and alive artists that SE claims they can’t find but who can be located by google in under 5 min? Matt, you stick up for these people; haven’t they learned to use the internet? Between Google, wikipedia and myspace they could do a pretty good job of cleaning up the list, if their objective really was to get artists paid and not rip them off instead.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
The RIAA and Sound Exchange will be able to look back and say: “we killed the music business and american jurisprudence” all in one sweep!
July 17th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
If you owe money to the government, they will hunt you down, guaranteed.
If the government owes you money, then strangely enough , they don’t seem to even bother looking.
Funny how the system works.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
According to the Recording Artists Coalition, it seems that not a single artist has received even a penny of the multi-million dollar settlements the RIAA wrung out of P2P companies from Napster to Kazaa, nor anything from the mass-shakedown of tens of thousands of P2P users that’s collected untold $millions.
If there’s one thing that can be said about the record companies - at least they’re consistent.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
@Matt
is that “Matt” as in “Michael ‘Matt’ Hausman?”
Because,
<quote> If you truely believe what you are telling us, then you are incompetent. If on the other hand you just pretend to believe it, we must regard you as a liar. Your choice! </quote>
July 18th, 2008 at 6:23 am
“The RIAA and Sound Exchange will be able to look back and say: “we killed the music business and american jurisprudence” all in one sweep!”
Add the so called composer and (the and are the real owners of the business and the recipients of 99 percent of the royalties) publisher/record company organizations such as ASCAP, BMI and their useless 100 million songs catalogs no one is able to see.