Hello Music - Another Music Licensing Company Newsletter
Monday, October 4th, 2010
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Posts Tagged ‘music services’
BPI & Aim Protest BBC Plan To Shut Down 6 Music
Wednesday, June 9th, 20106 Music closure ‘defies belief’, says music industryRecord industry bodies the BPI and Aim protest over BBC plans, while broadcasting minister Ed Vaizey backs digital station
6 Music: Lauren Laverne is just one of the DJs backing new music. Photograph: Rex Features..State Of Music - Re-post
Monday, June 7th, 2010From a Bob Lefsetz letter:
People just don't care. Every day I get e-mail castigating me that I've pissed on someone's favorite act, or haven't given enough coverage to another. I don't doubt that you like these acts, but what fascinates me is most people don't. Music is now niche. Kind of like knitting or needlepoint, but a bit bigger. Maybe we'll spread the analogy to sports. Music is tennis. Gargantuan decades ago, most people just don't care today. Billie Jean King, Jimmy Connors, even McEnroe... Today we've got Federer and Nadal and I can't tell them apart and might turn on a match once a year, whereas I used to watch religiously. But now there are few stars. Few personalities. And on the men's side, the game has become so damn fast as to be something completely different, the same way music veered off into hip-hop and divadom and most people stopped caring. Sure, some people cared, but relatively few, otherwise Mariah Carey would be selling out arenas every night, and she's not, and a rapper other than Jay-Z could do 20,000 a night too. Or maybe we should look at golf. There's one superstar, Tiger Woods, getting the whole nation golf-crazy, but if he's not playing, viewership drops dramatically. Sure, Phil Mickelson is a great golfer, but only golf devotees care about him, the average citizen might know his name and nothing more. We're under the illusion that music is king, that it drives the culture, but it's not. Music has become the sideshow. Even on "American Idol"...does anybody expect Lee DeWyze to make it? We're interested in the comings and goings of Simon Cowell, not the contestants. Sure, music is featured on the show, OLD MUSIC! And many people will go to hear old music live. But fewer each year at higher prices. After you've heard that famous act do its hits live, do you really need to go back? And the old acts are truly in it for the money, they've got no dignity, otherwise, why would they be shilling on TV, appearing on "American Idol"...I'm stunned they didn't lobby for a crawl with a link to tickets. Then again, everybody knows you go to ticketmaster.com for an experience you endure, but hate. This business will not be vital again until there’s a stable of stars, hopefully a plethora that people follow and want to see. And it would be great if they had something to say, if they were three-dimensional. GaGa is a start. Sure, she’s got train-wreck value, but people believe there’s substance underneath, and it’s not what you think, it’s what they think. Then, who else? Everybody else lives and dies on the hit single. If Christina Aguilera had fans, she’d be able to sell tickets without airplay. But she needs hits to get bodies into seats. In the old days, bands could tour without hits whatsoever. But that was back when music drove the culture, when you knew the players like sports team members, when you had to go to the show, when you were addicted to the radio. The radio. And then MTV. They centralized focus. They delivered a platform for star-building. Someone left of center could get exposure and make it. Like Culture Club. MTV broke Boy George big, radio followed. But FM radio built Hendrix and Cream, the music was so exciting you listened every night. Because everyone was different, everyone was testing limits, everybody wasn’t the same. And if you don’t think everybody’s the same today, try listening to Top Forty radio. So where do we go from here? Attention without substance is worthless. In other words, if you shoot someone, we’ll all know your name, but soon we’ll be on to the next headline. The audience demands universality, something mainstream. And mainstream does not mean compromised, it means quality! Something so good that it cannot be denied! Do you really think people care about a black/Asian golfer? Of course not, what drew people to Tiger was his ability, his greatness! So you’ve got a band that you like, are they so good that you can drag almost anybody to see them and they’ll like them too? If not, they’re niche. But, like I said, the whole business is niche. Labels believe if file-trading is stopped, an impossibility, sales will go up dramatically. I doubt it. People don’t care about music that much, they’re satisfied with free YouTube play. And certainly most people don’t care about the individual acts purveyed…how do we get them to care? It would be great if there were a Website, like Yahoo or Amazon or Google, actually more like the Huffington Post, to focus attention and build acts. But the site builders are only interested in money, not music, and therefore they focus on advertising, everything but the consumer experience. MySpace had a music focus, but its user interface sucked, still, how come every year there’s a new Net phenomenon, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and there’s never one solely music based? Ever think about that? The new Spotify is great, the social-networking elements trump iTunes, playlist sharing with instant listening ability is so cool…but it still doesn’t solve the problem that we’re lacking hit acts. I don’t want a world of endless niches. It’s incomprehensible. And the public doesn’t want one either. Which is why sales are so damn bad. It’s not like they just invented a new file-trading technique. No, most people can live without the music that’s being sold. You solve the problem the way you always have, with hit music. And the public doesn’t believe today’s music is full of hits. Their opinion, not yours. If you’re happy in your private little backwater, salivating in front of the stage before your favorite niche act, fine. But you’re not, because you keep telling everybody they should like your act too. But most people are never going to like the Hold Steady, the National or the Black Keys. Never gonna happen. And the fact that you’re a big fan and react to my point by going ballistic and e-mailing me does not solve the problem. I like “The Deadliest Catch”, shouldn’t you? No, that’s too mainstream… I like A&E’s “Intervention”…shouldn’t you? No, that’s pretty successful too. You can watch either of them even if you’ve never fished or never been addicted, because they’ve got underlying human elements that appeal to all. That’s the way music used to be. And it’s not that way now.
Call For Psychedelic Song
Saturday, May 8th, 2010
Here’s a call for a psychedelic song from Music Dealers. If you want to submit, please visit their website and upload your song submission right there. It is due Monday moring by 9am. Get on it!
Due Date:
05/10/2010 - 9:00am
- Feature Film - Fantasy
Music Call:
Client is looking to license an uptempo EPIC track for an upcoming major motion picture. The track needs to contain heavy psychedelic sounds and female vocals. The vocals should not be the focal point of the track, but rather the sounds. Heavy synths, multi-layered sounds, and high energy is needed in the track. The track is not warm nor dancey.
Genre:
Epic Psychedelic
Emotion:
Driving
Vocals/Instrumental:
Vocals - Female
Explicit Lyrics:
No
Music Matters, Especially On-Line
Monday, April 12th, 2010
Music matters, especially online
Established services such as Spotify and We7, and newcomers such as mflow, are music sites built for the needs of web users A new campaign, Music Matters, launched this week to remind people of the power of music and to encourage them “to consume music in an ethical way”. Backed by artists, retailers, record labels and others from the music industry, the campaign will provide a Music Matters Trustmark to websites that offer legal music.
If the attempt to combat illegal downloading of copyrighted music and illicit filesharing is taking a “carrot and stick” approach, then the Trustmark is the carrot. The stick will be provided by the Digital Economy Bill, which is likely to be rushed through Parliament before the election. The Bill proposes powers to disconnect people from the internet for persistent filesharing and to close down sites that are offering copyrighted material illegally.
The limited opportunity for a Commons debate on the Bill has angered many, including some internet service providers and several consumer groups. The Open Rights Group says that more than 10,000 people have written to their MPs to complain about the disconnection plans, which they say are disproportionate and open to misuse.
The music industry says nobody would be disconnected without several warnings and the right to appeal and dismisses such concerns as “scaremongering”. The fight against music piracy has been going on for more than a decade with limited success. The pirates had the web to themselves at first because the music industry was slow to wake up to the potential of the internet and hampered by the need to clear legal services with a huge range of rights holders. It took Apple to drive legitimate internet music into the mainstream. By combining the massively popular iPod, the iTunes music store and some tough negotiating with record labels, Apple built an online music service that still dominates the market today.
However, it’s a service that simply replicates the offline world. iTunes is a music shop: you pay, you receive, you own – just like buying a CD at the shops. More recently a range of music services have started that use the internet for more than just delivering files. Streaming services, such as Spotify and We7, remove the need for you to own and store the music.
The music is stored on a server – in ‘the cloud’ – and users can stream it to their computer without charge in return for having their listening broken up by adverts. Subscribers can turn the ads off and access their music from a mobile phone. Demand for Spotify is so great that Daniel Ek, its founder and CEO, says “on certain days we are consuming more internet capacity than Sweden as a country”. Spotify deals with this by using peer-to-peer technology. Peer-to-peer services don’t require all of the data to be streamed from a central server but instead spread the load to other users on the network. It’s an approach that has been taken by illicit filesharing sites, in part because it makes it harder to track down filesharers.
The use of the word ’sharing’ is important because that’s an intrinsic part of the appeal. People naturally want to share things that they find interesting and that includes music. Instinctively the music industry wanted to prevent that at first. If your business model is based on selling songs then you need to ensure that everyone who wants your song has to come to you to get it. Daniel Ek says that the new version of Spotify, which is due for release some time in the next few months, will make sharing much more integral to the experience. Next month a new service, mflow, will be launched that puts sharing at the heart of the service. Without its community element mflow is just like the iTunes music store. You can search for tracks, listen to 30-second snippets and then pay to download them.
However, the service has a Twitter-like element that allows you to follow people and for them to follow you back. You can “flow” music to your followers, which allows them to hear the entire song – not just the 30-second snippet. If they buy it you get 20 per cent of the price, which you can use to buy more music. Once you begin following a few people on mflow your in-box soon fills up with shared tracks, each accompanied by a short message – of 140 characters, like Twitter – from the person who shared it. Pretty soon you have your own personal radio station, programmed by your friends. It’s the first internet music service I’ve come across that has no real offline equivalent.
The key will be getting enough people on board to make it work. Legal online music services are now clearly better than their illicit competitors. However, many in the industry are concerned that streaming services cannot attract the numbers of listeners required to replace lost revenue from retail. Most people would agree that ‘music matters’. The industry is about to find out just how much.
Music Matters, Especially On-Line
Monday, April 5th, 2010Music matters, especially online Established services such as Spotify and We7, and newcomers such as mflow, are music sites built for the needs of web users A new campaign, Music Matters, launched this week to remind people of the power of music and to encourage them “to consume music in an ethical way”. Backed by artists, retailers, record labels and others from the music industry, the campaign will provide a Music Matters Trustmark to websites that offer legal music.
If the attempt to combat illegal downloading of copyrighted music and illicit filesharing is taking a “carrot and stick” approach, then the Trustmark is the carrot. The stick will be provided by the Digital Economy Bill, which is likely to be rushed through Parliament before the election. The Bill proposes powers to disconnect people from the internet for persistent filesharing and to close down sites that are offering copyrighted material illegally. The limited opportunity for a Commons debate on the Bill has angered many, including some internet service providers and several consumer groups.
The Open Rights Group says that more than 10,000 people have written to their MPs to complain about the disconnection plans, which they say are disproportionate and open to misuse. The music industry says nobody would be disconnected without several warnings and the right to appeal and dismisses such concerns as “scaremongering”. The fight against music piracy has been going on for more than a decade with limited success. The pirates had the web to themselves at first because the music industry was slow to wake up to the potential of the internet and hampered by the need to clear legal services with a huge range of rights holders. It took Apple to drive legitimate internet music into the mainstream.
By combining the massively popular iPod, the iTunes music store and some tough negotiating with record labels, Apple built an online music service that still dominates the market today. However, it’s a service that simply replicates the offline world. iTunes is a music shop: you pay, you receive, you own – just like buying a CD at the shops. More recently a range of music services have started that use the internet for more than just delivering files. Streaming services, such as Spotify and We7, remove the need for you to own and store the music.
The music is stored on a server – in ‘the cloud’ – and users can stream it to their computer without charge in return for having their listening broken up by adverts. Subscribers can turn the ads off and access their music from a mobile phone. Demand for Spotify is so great that Daniel Ek, its founder and CEO, says “on certain days we are consuming more internet capacity than Sweden as a country”. Spotify deals with this by using peer-to-peer technology.
Peer-to-peer services don’t require all of the data to be streamed from a central server but instead spread the load to other users on the network. It’s an approach that has been taken by illicit filesharing sites, in part because it makes it harder to track down filesharers. The use of the word ’sharing’ is important because that’s an intrinsic part of the appeal. People naturally want to share things that they find interesting and that includes music. Instinctively the music industry wanted to prevent that at first. If your business model is based on selling songs then you need to ensure that everyone who wants your song has to come to you to get it.
Daniel Ek says that the new version of Spotify, which is due for release some time in the next few months, will make sharing much more integral to the experience. Next month a new service, mflow, will be launched that puts sharing at the heart of the service. Without its community element mflow is just like the iTunes music store. You can search for tracks, listen to 30-second snippets and then pay to download them. However, the service has a Twitter-like element that allows you to follow people and for them to follow you back. You can “flow” music to your followers, which allows them to hear the entire song – not just the 30-second snippet. If they buy it you get 20 per cent of the price, which you can use to buy more music.
Once you begin following a few people on mflow your in-box soon fills up with shared tracks, each accompanied by a short message – of 140 characters, like Twitter – from the person who shared it. Pretty soon you have your own personal radio station, programmed by your friends. It’s the first internet music service I’ve come across that has no real offline equivalent. The key will be getting enough people on board to make it work.
Legal online music services are now clearly better than their illicit competitors. However, many in the industry are concerned that streaming services cannot attract the numbers of listeners required to replace lost revenue from retail. Most people would agree that ‘music matters’. The industry is about to find out just how much.
Music Industry Needs To Promote Legal Alt To Piracy
Friday, March 12th, 2010Music industry failing to promote legal alternatives to piracyThe music industry is failing to promote legal alternatives to piracy, according to a leading consumer group.
Almost 10 million copies of Lady Gaga?s single Poker Face were downloaded last year
Nine out of ten consumers that are aware of music services, have only heard of two established brands – iTunes and Amazon, according to the research.Consumer Focus, the Government-backed watchdog, sees the growth of the legal online music market as the best way to tackle online copyright infringement, but it claims that the music industry is failing to promote the many legal alternatives.
The consumer body surveyed 1995 adults and found that four in ten people are unable to name a single online music service at all – despite there being over 20 services on the market.Consumer Focus has called for an ‘all you can eat’ music scheme so internet users can enjoy unlimited, legal music downloads for a small additional monthly fee.Jill Johnstone, International Director, Consumer Focus, said: “The music industry is shooting itself in the foot by not promoting legal online music services. If file sharing is causing the damage the music industry claims, why aren’t they putting more effort in to promoting the legal alternatives?“Before we go down the enforcement road it is only fair to ask the music industry to do more to make people aware of the legal options.”The IFPI, the trade body that represents the recording industry, estimates than 95 per cent of downloaded music last year was not paid for.The Government’s Digital Economy Bill, not yet law, contains measures to disconnect persistent offenders through a process of graduated warnings.The consumer body has also called for reform of UK’s copyright licensing system to make it easier for online music services to offer copyrighted works to consumers legally.They claim that reform would encourage the growth of more legal alternatives such as streaming, “all you can eat”, micropayment, advertisement or subscription based models.The music industry said it was a “fallacy” to imply that awareness of legal music services is low.Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of the BPI, the record industry trade body, said: “It’s just not credible to suggest that people who are downloading illegally haven’t heard of iTunes, Amazon or other legal music services.“Our much larger, more recent and targeted online survey shows that awareness of legal music services among internet users is almost universal. The measures in the Digital Economy Bill are precisely what is needed to encourage illegal downloaders to move across to those legal services”.
Live & Digital Music Rock Your World
Sunday, November 15th, 20094 Ways Live and Digital Music Are Teaming Up to Rock Your World
- By Eliot Van Buskirk
- November 6, 2009 |
Music fans are increasingly watching live concerts without gassing up cars, driving to venues, or paying for expensive tickets and convenience fees. Music webcasting has shown promise for over a decade, but the stage is being set now for an online live-music renaissance.
YouTube webcast its first-ever live full-length concert last Sunday: U2 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. It brought in 10 million viewers worldwide in addition to the 100,000 who attended in person. A spokesman said that makes it the biggest event in the site’s history.
Billboard followed suit with the launch of Billboard Live. Sony has big plans to beam shows to its movie theaters over satellite, and interactive features are bringing online viewers closer to the mix, and sometimes into the mix.
Live music and digital music are opposite sides of the same coin. People listen to digital music alone, while concerts are about physical proximity to musicians and the crowd. Developers are finding a new middle ground, although it took a little longer than some of us thought.
Live Concert Webcasting
The audience for live online music has grown substantially since the Tibetan Freedom Concert drew 36,000 viewers in 1996. Live-music webcasting director Marc Scarpa, who helped stream the Tibetan Freedom Festival and co-created of the MySpace Live series, says the internet will soon realize its live music potential.
“‘Live’ music is going to have a renaissance now — the technology is proven, there’s more broadband penetration, people are now realizing that, from an advertising perspective, it can be monetized,” said Scarpa. In addition, today’s users, accustomed to Twitter, Facebook, live blogs and the general quickening of our culture “want entertainment and information in a real-time environment.”
Don’t expect to be able to watch any show you please. Licensing issues delay rollout on the scale of the music video. There’s no standard deal for getting the rights to stream a live show. Each one-off production requires extensive negotiation involving just about everyone attached to the songs and the venue.
Billboard Live streamed this R. Kelly show to web browsers and iPhones.
“It would be incredible if there were a database out there to streamline the process, but unfortunately, there isn’t,” Scarpa said, adding that music publishers in particular tend to hold things up. The rules can sometimes be bent for live shows that only air once, but usually “it’s a manual process,” he said, “e-mail, phone calls, and in a lot of cases the artist has to personally approve things.”
Straight trades between rights-holders and producers have improved the situation somewhat. In return for allowing an outside company to webcast a show, rights-holders often receive the right to sell the resulting recording, and could restream it online as part of a video-on-demand offering.
A Google spokesman said YouTube, which also streamed short live performances from the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in late August, plans to webcast more full-length shows like the live U2 concert on a case-by-case basis. But Billboard launched an ongoing concert series, Billboard Live, with a live R. Kelly show from Dallas that let fans choose between four high-bandwidth Microsoft Silverlight streams using partner OWLive’s technology. IPhone users watched the show in near-real time through an app using iStreamPlanet’s first-ever bandwidth-adaptive HTTP stream of live music to a phone. Billboard plans to do the same for shows by David Archuleta, Daughtry, Alicia Keys, Usher and others.
“Having been to about a billion concerts in my life, I can’t imagine anything replacing that energy,” said Billboard publisher Howard Appelbaum. “That said, it’s pretty exciting — seeing it from different camera angles is great. It’s not going to replicate the sound in the venue, or that palpable energy level that goes on, but it bridges the gap.… It’s way better than looking at still shots on a website about what happened at a concert, or reading about it. I think it’s going to find its own sweet spot with the consumers.”
The first Billboard Live show, promoted only on MSN, was responsible for Billboard.com’s second-highest day of traffic to date. Appelbaum said he thinks the licensing negotiations will be easier the next time around, because everyone involved stands to benefit — even concert promoters (the theory being that online shows whet the audience’s appetite to see concerts in person).
Josh Engroff, vice president of digital for Billboard, expects smaller, long-tail bands in addition to stars like U2 to make this part of their strategy. “‘Utube’ pulled in 10 million viewers because they’re U2 and the technology is there,” said Engroff. “But more and more, bands that haven’t been discovered yet are touring more, and ‘live’ is more a part of what they’re doing. They’re not just making CDs, they have to go out and gig a lot. For artists like that it’s also interesting, because they can extend their presence beyond the venue they’re in.”
Live Concert Interaction
The next step is for fans viewing a concert remotely to interact with a show within the venue, putting messages on the stage or even sounds in the speakers.
Deep Rock Drive has been experimenting with letting bands play between massive monitors that show online fans’ reaction to the music in real time, and said it might let fans at home cheer between songs using their own microphones. The payoff for interacting with actual venues rather than that company’s cyberstage is potentially even bigger.
“Instant participatory engagement is becoming key to the consumption of online entertainment, and the only way to do that is to make sure it’s live,” said Scarpa. “The key is participation in live events. That’s something you can’t do with a television broadcast.”
Current implementations let online viewers vote on set lists, appear in the webcast if chosen to be a host, and send in videos of themselves watching the show. “If Linkin Park is your favorite band in the world, you send in a video [of yourself talking about the show and] after the performance is over we can have a couple of these real-time video comments included in the show.”
In addition to the six to 10 cameras that shoot webcast concerts, Scarpa has been experimenting with pulling live video from showgoers’ cellphones and incorporating that into the webcast, and he plans to let the remote audience collaborate musically with bands, contributing riffs or mixes that play over the venue’s sound system.
‘Live’ Music in Movie Theaters, Living Rooms
Sony Club Dates (website offline) strikes a happy medium between the solitary experience of watching a show on your computer screen and the experience of attending it in person, by piping live or prerecorded shows directly to movie-theater screens. Fans watch them together in a surround-sound environment that does the music a lot more justice than your desktop computer speakers do, and at a much higher bandwidth. Tickets cost $10 to $15.
At this point, Sony has experimented with one live and some taped concerts, but once this pilot program is complete, the company plans to beam live shows to theaters bysatellite, selling tickets and sponsorships.
“We’ve converted [theaters] to a digital platform, using digital projectors and a connected environment as we move into the world order that exists today,” said Mike Fidler, Sony senior vice president of digital cinema solutions and services. “Most of the theaters’ demographics are really aligned with music demographics — close to 70 percent of the people attending theaters are under 30 — and so what we thought we’d try to do is bring these events during the week … and do it with emerging or emerged bands.” He said 3D could be the next phase.
Sony’s first such event featured an Aug. 20 Third Eye Blind show viewers could watch in theaters Oct. 22. Up next is Creed, who will appear “live” in some of Sony’s 4,000 theaters nationwide Nov. 19.
Once the program is up and running, Fidler told us, Sony will deliver the shows in high-definition directly to its Bravia line connected televisions, the company’s Blu-Ray players and possibly the Sony PlayStation. He said the concerts are “exclusive to Sony from the theatrical release to this video-on-demand program on the Bravia network.”
Just-in-Time Live Recordings Sold at Shows and Online
Showgoers can buy professionally recorded concerts as they exit a venue on USB stick, CD, DVD or as a digital delivery. While by no means the first, EMI launched a major initiative in this area Wednesday: Abbey Road Live, which builds on the legacy of Live Here Now, which was launched by EMI’s Mute Records label in 2004, and forms the core of EMI’s nearly-real-time live music sales program.
“We’re offering fans the ultimate encore,” said Simon Miller, EMI senior vice president of new product development and the company’s live division. “Being able to take home high-quality recordings of a show they’ve just seen is something we’re seeing great demand for from music lovers, and it’s also a service that artists and labels are very interested in.”
Screenshot: Girl Talk performs in 2008’s All Points West virtual tour.
Facebook Beats Out MySpace In Traffic - Re-post
Friday, October 16th, 2009|
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Facebook Traffic Soars As MySpace Tumbles ANALYSIS: For marketers of music, success is not just found in overall numbers, but in who is being reached. MySpace still puts more emphasis on music and attracts a younger crowd; though that too is shifting: the 18-34 demo declined 13% at MySpace and increased 10% at Facebook last year. Twitter users are more active consumers and often help shape trends and opinions.But Facebook has the eyeballs and is grabbing more every day. If there is still mass media, Facebook, at this moment, is it. *** Personally I prefer MySpace for making Music Contacts. If you have a MySpace account, come visit us at www.myspace.com/Songs2Share. We listen to music over there every week. |
Music Copyright Should Be Technology Neutral = Re-post
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Composers, music publishers, and songwriters have told federal lawmakers that regardless of whether music is distributed to consumers via TV, DVDs or digital download, they need legislative help to ensure they get their fair share.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a story about how some of these groups want iTunes and other Web music retailers to pay performance fees for downloads of TV shows and films. They also want online music stores to cough up fees for 30-second song previews. Those revelations didn’t go over well with many techies.
But to get a better understanding of what the artists want from Congress, I asked David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association, to forward me a copy of a March 10 letter written to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee by a consortium of trade groups representing songwriters, composers, and publishers. He agreed.
In the letter, signed by Israelite and representatives of such groups as Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI); American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP); and Songwriters Guild of America, the consortium wrote: “Technology should not be used to strip rights from songwriters, composers and music publishers. The choice of certain audiovisual delivery systems or methods over others should not result in a diminution of creators’ rights or royalties.”
The group later made this statement: “There is no question that copyright should be technology neutral” and asked Congress to make “a clarification to the copyright law” that specifically says that “the public performing right is implicated in digital downloads” of audiovisual works that feature music.
.. “There is no question that copyright should be technology neutral. Technology should not be used to strip rights from songwriters, composers and music publishers”–Music creators wrote in a letter to congress ..”We believe Congress intended the current law to be platform neutral,” the music consortium wrote to the senators. “The conflicting interpretations demand clarification, for without it, performing right income of songwriters, composers and publishers is seriously threatened.”
The lobbying efforts of the songwriters, composerss and music publishers continue.
All of this started with the shift in the way the public consumes media. Songwriters and publishers have for a long time collected performance fees from broadcast TV networks and film studios, but now more and more consumers are watching films and TV shows downloaded to their iPods or laptops, which at this point aren’t considered public performances.
A federal district judge court ruled in 2008 that “there is no copyright protection for the public performance right when a work containing music is digitally transmitted for future playing or viewing” the consortium wrote in the March 10 letter.
The music creators have appealed the decision.
How is this the consumer’s problem?
To critics, composers, songwriters and publishers are asking for a guarantee that they will get paid for public performances even if there isn’t any public performance.
Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Web users and technology companies, disagrees with the argument that copyright should be technology neutral.
“The Copyright Act has never been technology neutral,” von Lohmann said. “The (Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s) Safe Harbors only applies to online services. There are areas that apply only to cable and satellite providers. The Copyright Act is always trying to strike a compromise.”
He added that music creators already collect other licensing fees, for such things as synchronization rights and he maintains, iTunes or other music retailers shouldn’t be responsible for making up losses for music creators.
“The copyright owner is going to get paid,” von Lohmann said. “Whether it’s called a performance or a reproduction the copyright owner is going to get paid. This is just a turf war between middlemen about who is going to take a piece off the top. The copyright office has tried to broker some sort of solution between the various parties for years with little success.
“We’ll get some more guidance from the courts soon,” he continued, “but I doubt that will be the last word. As (Israelite’s) letter suggests the parties can all go fight it out in Congress now.”