p2pnet - rss feed: Not-so-golden-oldies: have your cake and eat it
p2pnet news view P2P | Music:- “The rock dinosaurs of the 1960s are in line for a spectacular windfall after the EU announced plans yesterday to extend musicians’ entitlement to retrospective royalties from 50 to 95 years,” says Times Online.
It continues that Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who and one of the potential beneficiaries, “has said that thousands of musicians have no pensions and rely on royalties in their old age.”
But, as the story dryly notes, the extra income, “is probably not essential for paying the winter heating bills”.
Charlie McCreevy, the Internal Market Commissioner, said performers’ rights, “would be brought into line with those of authors, as is the case in America,” the story says, going on to quote him as saying:
“A 95-year term would bridge the income gap that performers face when they turn 70, just as their early performances recorded in their twenties would lose protection. They will continue to be eligible for broadcast remuneration for performances in public places and compensation payments for private copying of their performances.”
In 2006 Cliff Richard was among Not-So-Golden-Oldies such as Paul McCartney, U2, Yoko Ono [Yoko Ono?], Barry Gibb, Petula Clark and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa [?] who paid for a costly full-page newspaper advertisement demanding the UK government extend the copyright in sound recordings to 95 years.
That fell flat, but, “the record industry pledged to take the fight to Europe,” says Times Online.
“At the time, Sir Cliff said: ‘I’m absolutely fed up with singing Living Doll but I have sung it constantly since 1959 because every time I sing it live it generates sales of the original record and royalties to me’.”
It’s a good thing Richard and the others aren’t signed up with the (un)SoundExchange, the ex- Big 4 organised music cartel US collection agency which makes a habit of losing track of the people it’s supposed to be paying.
Speaking of the “the income gap” facing retired performers who aren’t lucky enough to be permanently plugged into the non-stop royalties loop, p2pnet has just published an update of Project Unfound Artist.
By way of a follow up, “A recent email list discussion of Project Unfound Artists was stimulated by a participant’s observation that recording artists have the obligation to look out for their own affairs,” says Fred Wilhelms, the Nashville entertainment lawyer who started the project and who’s been almost single-handedly trying to locate artists to whom SoundExchange owes money.
Piles of it.
“The underlying implication of this position is that if they fail to register, it is their own fault,” he says, going on »»»
That argument prompted a response from me, which it is believed will help generally illuminate some of the issues that the Project was intended to address.
With that as the goal, this is the substance of my answer:
What everyone in the world except SoundExchange seems to have realized is that the community making music in the US today is only a fraction of the recorded music available to the public via streaming and satellite radio. Putting on a nice showcase at SXSW isn’t going to reach the substantial number of artists who aren’t active in the business at all right at the moment.
Please remember that John Simson has compared SoundExchange’s obligation to find artists to that of a bank. He said a bank doesn’t have to go look for its depositors, so SoundExchange cannot be held responsible if artists don’t give them good contact information. The pure arrogance of that statement is astounding, but completely in keeping with an organization that, in a recent press release, claims that the fact that Internet radio hasn’t collapsed since the new rates were announced is proof that it can survive under the new rates, despite their failure to mention that those new rates were still suspended pending further negotiations. With the propensity for that kind of bull throwing, blaming artists for not signing up with an organization they don’t know exists is par for the course.
I might be a tad more sensitive to this than most because much of my work these days is for veteran performers, many of whom stopped actively recording before the advent of the Internet, and for the families of deceased artists. For a great majority of those artists, royalties were historically what their record labels promised but never paid, so talking about a new source of royalties was meaningless blather to them, even if they heard about it. For some of the people I found and got registered, the SoundExchange check was the first earned royalty payment they had received in 50 years or more of performing. Expecting these people to stay current with the Internet, or learn about SoundExchange by tripping across the organization website, is pretty presumptuous, when few of them are even connected to the Internet in the first place.
I’d love to hear from someone at SoundExchange what they have actually done to try to reach these people, but it is pretty clear they don’t want to discuss it, and equally clear they think they don’t have to discuss it. They don’t even issue self-congratulatory press releases any more. Obviously, if they don’t acknowledge the issue, it really isn’t an issue. Not being responsible to anyone outside your own boardroom has it’s rewards, and being able to ignore critics is probably high on the list of perks. I am sure that is part of the charm of being a government-endorsed monopoly.
SoundExchange knew this was part of the job when they took it. They went so far as to spend a great deal of time telling people how hard the job was, and how great they were at doing it. There are 40,000 reasons to not believe a word they say.
As of this morning, there are 300 even better reasons; that’s the number of artists who have registered since Project Unfound Artist began. Volunteers with nothing to gain except seeing artists get paid have done a demonstrably better job at getting people registered than the professional organization ostensibly formed to do it. I mention this with the real trepidation that SoundExchange will intentionally stop updating the list so that it will look like the project has failed, thus proving how hard it is to find people and pay them. Reality has never been an obstacle for them, as long as they can manipulate perception.
The Project isn’t going to reach many of those veteran artists like the ones I serve. Many of them don’t have email, and the very concept of webcasting is alien to them. We won’t find these artists on line. From experience, I know that I will somehow find one, who just saw a second list artist at a third’s funeral, and I will get another address. I will talk to some festival promoter who had a couple listed artists on the bill last year and ask how he located them. Because he’s a fan, he will tell me. I will rely on a growing circle of print journalists, bloggers, and just plain fans who are going to see someone on the list in a club in Jackson, or Myrtle Beach, or even Sydney, and wants to know what to say to them about registering. I’ve talked to sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, ministers, nurses and even a parole officer or two. The mission is to get these people registered, whatever it takes. It just ain’t that hard.
Frankly, I would love to focus on finding those folks on the fringes. SoundExchange clearly doesn’t have the first clue on how to do it, and just as clearly, they don’t care. 40,000 unfound artists say they don’t, and that is one hell of a choir.
These artists are older, and they’ve been put through the mill already by a business that took the magic they made and threw them away. They are part of our cultural heritage. They have earned our respect, and they deserve to be paid. They don’t know SoundExchange promised to do that, but we do. Help me find as many people on the list as you can, and I can spend the rest of the time on those equally worthy targets that aren’t on the grid.
Stay tuned.
.
.Stumble It!
newspaper advertisement - Big Music’s UK defeat, July 25, 2007
Times Online - Sir Cliff Richard pins hopes on law that will keep cash rolling in until he’s 113, July 17, 2008
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July 17th, 2008 at 10:14 am
to address one point of Fred:
“I mention this with the real trepidation that SoundExchange will intentionally stop updating the list so that it will look like the project has failed, thus proving how hard it is to find people and pay them. Reality has never been an obstacle for them, as long as they can manipulate perception.”
If it turns out that such a behaviour of SUX is to be expected in the future, I suggest that you 2 “record keepers” will <s>strike</s> on your (hopefully comming) updates of that list those entries where Fred can say for sure that the person(s) in question did get hold of the money robbers and made them pay.
If you manage to do that, we could prevent that angry pirates that hate the labels but love the artists they pirate start to annoy poeple on the list with repeated “hey did you knew that you have people that owe you money waiting that you contact them?” mails.
Just as an example: PUR on the list, I had back then when the issue surfaced first time on p2pnet contacted via their fan forum. I guess so that issue should have reached the artists that are “PUR” and that entry should vanish some updates of the lsit from now.
July 17th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Again with the “it’s our retirment fund” crap. I have to put away money I make now for my retirement, why should someone else keep getting paid for work they did 50 years ago, let alone 90 years ago.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
I am forced to wonder why anyone would need millions of dollars a year in their old age retirement even if they’ve blown all their previous wealth, since they could die at any time. Most people live on pensions anyway. Why should they get all this extra money without earning it if they’re too lazy to work?
July 17th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
90 years? Would they even be alive by then? Even if they had performed in their 20s they’d still have to be over a century old to be living until the end of this royalty collection period.
Perhaps these pensions should be paid by cheque directly to these artists; that way, even after these dinosaurs shift past their mortal coil, they’ll only get to use the money if they can cash it.
(Taken from a joke I once saw)
July 21st, 2008 at 9:19 am
Copyright is sold as an incentive to produce in the future.
Now it turns out that it was all along for work in the past.
Laws are never supposed to apply backward in time.
Now it turns out that based on a new law you can be jailed for something you did before the laws was passed.
Pensions are supposed to be based on money someone put in the pension plan.
Now it turns out that this new pension plan requires no money to be put in the plan.
Pension money is supposed to go to the pensioner.
Now it turns out that the pension can be paid to the employer, the so called rights holders.
Another post says “Singer Lyle Lovett has sold 4.6 million albums in the USD since 1991 and his most recent release, It’s Not Big It’s Large, has sold about 145,000 since last September, according to Nielsen SoundScan, says Billboard.”.
If active performers such as Lovett, who can still produce more work (if paid) are not paid, why bother with the retired and dead ones?
Just what is the incentive, and for whom?
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:13 am
AND PATENT DURATION?
“A 95-year term would bridge the income gap that performers face when they turn 70,”
Then, to be consistent and to treat engineers, scientists and inventords the same way as performers, why not extend patents from the current 18 years to 95 years.
Now that would be a boom for reserch and development and society would really benefit. Certainly more and better, medicines and technologies could and do more for humanity than more comic books, pornography, crap movies and music, the type of flashy works mostly incentivated by excessive copyright terms.
Development of medicines and technologies are generally much costlier and require much more complex knowledge than one create one of the crap songs pushed today and that make millions for record companies. The inventor of the mouse neve made one off his invention because the patent ended just before the personal computer went graphical and mouse sales took off. Does this make any sense? Of course not.
Seriously, Iam not advocating longer patent periods (or patents at all). It’s just that politicians apply disparate logic to entertainment vs science and technology.
Just food for thought.
RV