If you haven't gathered already, I'm a musician. And since I started playing professionally, I've been a member of a performance royalty association - in my case I've been a member of SOCAN (the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) for almost twenty years. There's a few of these organizations around - In the United States they're BMI and ASCAP - and in many ways they're quite reputable.
Basically what they do is collect performance royalties for artists who are members of their organizations - for example if you get played on the radio, the radio stations pay the organization for every play and in turn they pay the artist their fee. They also usually handle things like when you play a show, they get royalties from the venue for your performance.
Cool right? I mean, how can you complain about extra money just because you were successful at what you set out to do in the first place?
Actually, I'm not going to complain about that. What does bother me is this:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/12/23/scoc-music-previews.html
Basically, SOCAN is suing for royalties to be taken from music 'previews' - thirty second clips that you would get on say, iTunes, or in the case of the article above, from major telecommunications companies like Rogers and Bell here in Canada who offer music downloads as well.
Now, I'm certainly not a fan of telecommunication companies - particularly in this country, and you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who would defend them here either.
I'm more concerned with the precedent this sets. I'll start from the beginning...
I don't know if anyone has noticed, but the music industry has changed an awful lot in the last ten years. I've done both ends of the last two decades as a musician and I'll tell you it's like apples and oranges on either side. These days, the Majors have their rosters but they are certainly not developing new talent, at least not committing to long term artist development over the course of many albums and a lot of money. The hope that a label will back your talent has become a feeble hope at best, and even ten years ago, the odds of getting that kind of backing weren't very good anyways.
In a nutshell, it means most musicians are doing it for themselves. They're spending their own money to record, mix, master and manufacture their own albums out of pocket, they are paying to promote their record out of pocket, to tour, be heard, get people wearing their t-shirts, whatever it takes. And that includes getting their own distribution. I know a few people who, despite the difficulty and the financial burden of doing this, manage to eke out a half decent living at it, and even enjoy being the 'boss' so to speak. It's really hard to do, but I think much more satisfying in the end if you can pull your own rabbit out of your own hat.
One of the most difficult, time consuming and expensive methods the label-free artist has to promote themselves is on the radio. Almost every station needs a disc sent to them (most still don't take digital, though they're working on it) so you've gotta mail out those. In Canada alone there are hundreds. There are station managers and program directors to butter up, but since most radio is now owned by just a small (count on one hand) cluster of media conglomo's, it's hard to know who to send this stuff to. That, and they get hundreds if not thousands of solicitations for airplay on a daily or weekly basis. Then you have to call and make sure package was received, another expense.
So the equation is: hundreds of expensive discs given away for free + sent out paid post to someone you don't know + calling them long distance to confirm the arrival of the package + the time involved to do all of that + no guaranteed result in the end = a pricey and risky endeavour.
Some people hire a radio tracker (someone who does all this for you), but they can cost thousands just to push a single SONG on the air.
What I'm getting at is that mainstream radio is, for the most part, pretty much out of reach for most independent musicians. There is college radio - which I love and has always been great to me so don't get me wrong - but the problem with strictly college radio promo is the range of listenership; it's usually not very big.
So SOCAN is collecting royalties from radio stations that are not actively playing say, local or even provincial talent. The CANCON rules for radio ensure that 35% of all programming MUST be Canadian, but from what I can hear, all that seems to get us is more Brian Adams, Sum 41 and other unmentionables for the most part... artists with label backing. So really, most radio is really not interested in taking a chance on anything outside of the archetypal zone of music 'industry'. And if you think Payola is a thing of the past, well, you've got another think coming.
So back to it - now this performance rights organization wants to force digital distributors to pay out royalties for thirty seconds of audio clip. Not a whole song, a preview. Right now it's Rogers and Bell that they're after - who are largely selling more mainstream industry based music, but who's to say that it won't apply to any other distributor in the future? I know iTunes has previews, it's pretty much the same, so why not them too?
Right now artists usually pay third party aggregate companies like TuneCore or Reverbnation a small fee to get their albums heard on iTunes, Raphsody, Napster, Amazon etc. So if there's a royalty tariff applied to thirty second previews for these distributors, who's gonna pay for it? I somehow, don't picture iTunes shelling out the dosh on this one. Nope, the cost will either be passed to you the consumer directly or, to the the aggregate companies getting the artists to the distributor in the first place, which they in turn will put on the artist, who will then put it upon the consumer.
Back in the day, the average that an artist got per album sold if they were signed to a major label was about 12 cents. Yep, you read that right. 12 cents per album to the artist or band who wrote and played on the whole record. Now we live in a time where the artist gets everything minus the cost of producing, manufacturing and distributing. They may not move as many units, it's still not loads of money, but they get more per-record than they ever did (more than 12 measly cents) and the onus is on them to take it as far as they can with the resources at their disposal.
So why, as someone who has to pay a fee to get someone to distribute my own music, would I want to pay SOCAN extra money - because the distributors and aggregates will certainly up their rates to accommodate the organizations demands - that they're going to trickle back to me in a year or so?
What if I'm not a member of SOCAN? I still gotta pay that fee and it would probably mean I'm giving my fee/royalties to artists who are members of the organization and not getting one cent back from it... fuck, I'm already paying out for everything else. I'm not getting even a fraction of the radio play say, Avril Lavigne gets. If I am a registered member, radio royalties are nice, but they're not paying the bills. So why do I have to foist another fee on my loyal fan base?
Consumers tend to be a little more fickle, and in the world of music, that probably means they'll just go out and find what you're selling for free - because they can, and with music as you may know, this is pretty easy to do. Which means the double whammy of SOCAN members still being stuck with the royalty fee that they just get back in royalties, but of course with less paying customers.
I for one don't want my performance rights organization dictating the terms of how I interact with my market, it's costly enough for artists as it is. Grants and government support is way down, and this is one of the last ways available to us to make this a viable business. The organization that is supposed to ensure we're monetarily protected in slow and tough times is threatening to take all of that away.
A preview is simply that - an opportunity for the artist to display the best of what they have, so they can sell their product at a fair price. Fair trade music. This is not an old technique for selling or moving product - coffee shops give away free samples, the grocery store has those little tables set up so you can taste new products on offer. For an artist to really stand out amongst the thousands of other musicians in their genre alone, they need to be able to show what they're made of, to show their potential consumers that they're worth the money they're thinking of paying out for. It's a small price to pay giving a little something away to get the larger benefit in the end, and it's value added service.
SOCAN, in my opinion is looking to hobble, for most of us, our ability to do this for ill conceived reasons; they're doing it because they're still looking at things the way they used to be, not the way that they are. They're not striking one for the thousands of musicians who are associated with them. They're striking one for the small minority of musicians who are signed to labels who are currently in the position of trying to extract money from anywhere they can because of their own lack of forsight into the changes in the distribution model, and so they can feel like they still have some control of the destiny of the industry.
And, as much as I appreciate the original idea behind the organization, their actions and inability to see the obvious markers into the future of music as an industry on many issues has left me leaning on the farthest side of the fence from them.
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