RIAA Wants Artist Royalties Lowered 399
laughingcoyote writes "The RIAA has asked the panel of federal government Copyright Royalty Judges to lower royalties paid to publishers and songwriters. They're specifically after digital recordings, and uses like cell phone ringtones. They say that the rates (which were placed in 1981) don't apply the same way to new technologies."
From the article: "According to The Hollywood Reporter, the RIAA maintains that in the modern period when piracy began devastating the record industry profits to publishers from sales of ringtones and other 'innovative services' grew dramatically. Record industry executives believe this to be cause to advocate reducing the royalties paid to the artists who wrote the original music."
one would hope... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please refer back to this article (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds Good (Score:1, Insightful)
What? Ohhh, my bad. These rules don't apply to the RIAA - just to everyone else they screw over.
Obviously its the other way round (Score:5, Insightful)
Artists and Writers Deserve Their Own Living (Score:3, Insightful)
What about CD prices? (Score:4, Insightful)
What are these people SMOKING?????? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I read the referenced article.
I owe the editors an apology for my mistaken assumption.
From TFA:
In other words, the RIAA has actually admitted what most Slashdotters have know all along - their crusade is concerned strictly with the "revenues for music publishers", and if enhancing said revenues means screwing the artists, then so be it.
Another point: "...so that record companies can continue to create the sound recordings...". Since when did record companies start creating anything? They take the creations of the artists, slap their name on them, and bleed off the majority of the profits for themselves.
I thought that the RIAA couldn't possibly sink any lower - looks like I was wrong.
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
I really think that we'll see an improvement in the quality of music as a result of this.
Re:RIAA does *not* represent artists (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but they like to use the artists for sympathy in their anti-piracy propaganda. But don't take my word for it, check out this page on their website [riaa.com] where we have the following (emphasis added):
So yes, they DO claim they're doing this for the sake of the artists, you and the grandparent are both correct. The RIAA are claiming to be fighting piracy at least partially for the artists' benefit (although note it says "perhaps most importantly" about the artists) while at the same time trying to stab the artists in the back (again) by lowering their royalties even though they say that 95% of artists depend on those royalties to make a living. That last bit about artists' reputations suffering from sales of inferior quality pirated copies is kinda questionable in this day and age. A pirated CD should sound the same as the real thing, sometimes better since they'll remove any DRM crap from it.
Personally I don't see how they do it, having a soul-ectomy must be a job requirement.
The bright side (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Please refer back to this article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obviously its the other way round (Score:2, Insightful)
Electronic distrbution costs the distributers nothing other than a sales rep signing the contract and an accountant raking in the cash. De telco's, iTunes', etc. and the *customer* pay for the distribution. Artists shoud seriously wonder what the added value of the distributors is here.
RIAA = Middlemen - Excise. (Score:5, Insightful)
In all honesty, the labels aren't good for consumers. They stifle creativity and promote the stagnation of musical forms by promoting "safe" music over the innovative. This is why a top-40 music station sounds so homogenous whether it's playing pop-country, pop-rock, or pop-rap. Instead of promoting original artists, they hire 40 year old men to write songs about a teenage girl's life, hire a model who can't sing to sing those songs, and then digitally correct the tone-deaf waif's caterwallings in much the same way they air-brush away her zits and about 40 pounds. Then they promote this manufactured crap so heavily that it squeezes good music into the musical margins of life.
The labels aren't good for artists. Only a tiny percentage of artists signed to major labels ever make a profit. Most wind up in debt to the labels with no control over the rights to their own creations. Is the purpose of a record label to make money for itself or is it to make money for the artists? In the past RIAA has argued that artists provide a service, much like recording engineers or the squeegee monkeys that keep the windows of the exec's corner offices clean. They pay their lawyers better than 99.999% of their artists. Those lawyers enforce a copyright system designed to pump money into those corner offices at any cost. One of the costs happens to be the freedom of artists. Take the amen break for example. A whole musical genre grew up around a single sample made 40 years ago because the copyright on it was never enforced. What legally aborted genres might exist today were it not for the labels' lawyers?
Personally, I think RIAA and the major labels know all this. They know they have no legitimate role to play in distribution. They know they manufacture and promote crap because promoting original music carries risk. They screw the artists both financially and creatively. On some level, although they'd never admit it, they even realize that the labels are, at the most fundamental level, only there to get the music from the artist to the consumer and the money from the consumer to the artist. They're middlemen and they know it.
How do you improve any business transaction for both the consumer and the supplier? Cut out the middlemen.
Re:Obviously its the other way round (Score:3, Insightful)
Paying less royalties for different quality would lead to a classification of media we don't need at all. Think of the opposite situation: recording agencies would then be in the position to ask a higher price for "superior" media like DVDs or CDs. A creation is a creation no matter what the media or quality is (as long as it is recognizable, of course).
Re:RIAA does *not* represent artists (Score:4, Insightful)
Why artists? (Score:1, Insightful)
When you say artists, I think you're talking about sculptors, architects and painters. Our english language has a word for people who make music: musicians (which contains composers, instrumentalists and singers). I understand there exist some genius (and under-rated) musicians whose fabulous talent is a blessing to our world, and deserve to be referred to alongside of da Vinci and their work compared to Guenica, but there is a lot of shit on the radio that is not original, made by people who are not talented. An excuse for music, it isn't art for sure.
To illustrate this ludicrousity, just go check out some profiles on deviantART (if you don't know it, it houses some fantastic photography, painting, sculpture and drawing). Read someone's profile and beneath "favourite styles of art: painting, tapestry" you can read on so many profiles "favourite artists: green day, fall out boy" , "favourite artists: james blunt, spice girls". It hurts to think about what these people were thinking they were being asked.
So please, call U2 a band and Bono a musician.
Re:Obviously its the other way round (Score:3, Insightful)
They probably would not get cheaper, but the RIAA's members would get a bigger share of the pie at the expense of the artists.
Re:RIAA does *not* represent artists (Score:1, Insightful)
reputations, which are damaged by the inferior quality of pirated copies sold to the public
Yet out of one of the other mouths they've been claiming for years that "piracy" is affecting them so broadly because of the perfect nature of said pirated copies. Someone point me again to that section in US Code that legislates a guaranteed revenue stream for the recording industry?
As an Artist Myself... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why artists? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing the entirety of the music industry to the entirety of DeviantArt is fucking insane, as most people on DeviantArt do not make at their vocation, let alone their business. You are comparing a 15-year-old kid's drawing of a Yu-Gi-Oh character to the entire catalog of the Beatles.
By lumping 'musicians' as their own group, away from 'artists,' it's like saying that music somehow has a baseline for appreciation that is lower than that of, say, Rodin. Yet the Rodin Museum has to advertise like crazy to get people in the door, and Green Day sells out in seconds.
Does this mean that Green Day is better than Rodin? No. Does this mean that your analogy is nearly indescribably obtuse? Yes.
Music is art. Some music is brilliant. Other music is not. Some paintings are brilliant. Other paintings are not. Do the math -- Music is art.
Re:As an Artist Myself... (Score:1, Insightful)
Its no secret the industry is dying,no point in going down with it.There are several GNU-like licenses out there,Open music etc. Look em over.
When you think about it,the industry dying,it's a good thing.The industry promoted mostly(i said mostly not all) talentless,manipulable artists,obscuring many lesser knowns with the real goods.The internet is the great equalizer.A level playing field if you will.Your success depends on your talent and effort.
These are revolutionary times my friend,pick your side carefully.
wtf? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me get this straight - record industry profits were devasted when profits from 'innovative services' dramatically grew ?
Talk about contradicting yourself.
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
That day has already arrived, and it has brought little change. We already have lots of artists, mainly the kind who can't get signed up by a record label, who publish their work online. It is only the tiny minority that get signed up by a major record label that we hear about though, and they are precisely the ones who will not 'cut out the middleman', because for them, the RIAA actually do provide a service: they advertise and brainwash the public into liking those choice few artists who are blessed with RIAA's stamp, leading to a tiny minority of artists making virtually all of the income in the music industry. How many artists are played on MTV? Not many.
[The RIAA's] greed will be their undoing. I wonder why it hasn't been their undoing in the past though?
The problem is that the public is very easily controlled by advertising and the media. So long as that is true, the RIAA will be able to create a few 'big acts', and to get the public to listen only to them. A few 'big acts' are easily controlled by the RIAA, especially since those acts will only make money as long as the public is convinced that they like them - which is the only thing the RIAA is good at.
In this media-driven age, I don't expect things to change anytime soon. But yes, cheap recording and publishing technology is helpful, even if only in a small way.
Re:Terrorism (Score:2, Insightful)
Royalities on ring tones???? WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
There is not enough of a tone sequence to pay a royality on. Only enough to play the game "what ring tone is that from?"
Seriously, it may just barely step over the copyright line by linke three notes of something BUT there is the fair use clause.
And considering the most useful thing about ring tones is having a different one than everyone else around you, its not like they are of much valueto share.
Maybe you have collectors of ring tone (like you did with amiga mod files - but even then a mod file is at least a whole song) and perhaps The RIAA should push legistration for requiring collectors to register (get a collector license) or something.
Another thought is that ring tone users, should charge the RIAA for using their phone as an advertising media, like ads on your web site and getting paid for clicks...
But in no case should RIAA be able to use ring tones as an excuse to lower the royalities the artist get. If anythinhg they shoul increase them if they are not paying the phone users for advertising space.
Somebody really needs to lay it all out and really slap the RIAA down via exposure of their hyporacies.
To be clear, there is no reason with todays technology to subsidize new band promotional risks with the profits off the successful artist (one of the reason we having had enough real creativity on the air). What this means is that the profits/finances the record industry needed in the past to bring new artists to the public with hope the public will buy, doesn't need to be spent today as the internet is alot less expensive and artist can themselves get a following to prove themselves and have bargaining power with any contract they might sign with a label. The fact they did it themselves should show they are serious and business oriented. This path greatly reduces the need to subsidize and mean the successful artist should get more... not less (as they are not helping tro pay for other unknow artist to be market tested)
Maybe that is the problem here! Maybe the new technology is resulting in successful artist annual income to be raising and the RIAA figures it can take some of it but need an excuse (and we all know they do make use of excuses/lies to support their claims).
Re:Who needs the RIAA? (Score:3, Insightful)
The music studios are capitalist to a degree but they are most certainly unenlightened capitalists. They don't acknowledge, under any conditions, that any other entity, private or corporate, should be permitted to compete with them. And when they can't use their anticompetitive market practices to guarantee control of product distribution, they start whining and lying, and then they head for Washington and get some more protectionlist laws passed without regard for any collateral damage. I'm really getting sick of these people
Re:What the fuck man, have you no compassion? (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't do drugs....
Is it really that hard to get? (Score:3, Insightful)
The establishment has the connection with radio, magazine, and TV to promote their artists, and they want to get paid for spending millions of dollars on marketing their products. It's no different from fashion industry or any other marketing driven companies, they sell stuff by making it artificially popular. For me, this is no different from talking with their suppliers (artist) to cut down the cost.
What I don't understand... (Score:2, Insightful)
As I see it, and this may just be the way I buy music, the reason I buy or don't buy music is because I like the artist, or I have heard something from them and want to hear more. I don't buy an artist because Sony or BMG is distributing it (although that may make me not want to buy an artist's CD). The recording industry should be paid for the service they provide and the artists should be the ones in the drivers seat. If the artist doesn't want full control, well thats what agents are for, right?
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they're making a huge profit?
Because "new distribution technologies" is a thorn they faced before, and successfully got on the side of the law?
Because the current law has adopted to aid their business model?
Because, when you get right down to it, someone barely paying you for your work is better than someone NOT paying you for your work?
The audience... (Score:3, Insightful)
I was told, "There is a saying in the music industry: The audience eats shit."
And it does - to someone who appreciates the 'finer, more nuanced, less well known' areas of an art form. Music, like any art form, has a certain section that appeals the masses; A very small section at that. The casual audience doesn't have the patience or interest to delve deeper most of the time. They have something that makes them happy and they are content with that.
Let's take everyone's "Lave Her" or "Hate Her" 'musician': Britney Spears. Have you ever heard her sing? I watched an interview of her a few years back and she was asked to sing solo. No backup, no music, no effects to cover her voice. It was absolutely atrocious. That doesn't matter though; She performs well enough on stage, and combined with the marketing and enough makeup on her voice to make it acceptable, people are happy with 'her' product. "Enough ketchup and even my mother's cooking is edible."
Personally, I wouldn't even take an album of hers for free. I don't consider it art; I consider it boring, unimaginative, repetitive, and headache-inducing. Ultimately, though, I don't think that it is within the power of a few individuals to determine what 'art' is, except for themselves. It is society's job to determine what is art to society.
Unfortunately (in my opinion), Britney Spears, 50 Cent, Snoop Dog, etc. are all considered artists in society right now. That doesn't matter though; Nobody is holding me captive and forcing me to listen to their product.
95% of all statistics lie (Score:2, Insightful)
The average band makes maybe roughly 1-2$ per CD sold. FEW artists sell as much as 10,000 of an album. Take those say 20,000 dollars and for conversations sake divide it by the 3-5 band members. Yeah, nice yearly salary. If you are lucky and skilled enough to live of being an artist you play live acts for the "steady" income and your royalites make a bonus.
For royalites to make a liveable income in it self you have to hit superstardom(Gwen stefani, metallica, etc). You would be suprised at how many of the one-hit-wonders get some bling-bling, a couple of celeb parties and end up with no cash at the end of the 15-minutes of fame.
Re:RIAA does *not* represent artists (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the inferior quality, the RIAA should check their own mastering studios. They should be ashamed to sell audio CDs that contain clipping [cdmasteringservices.com].
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
The only difference is that before you couldn't really prove or be able to tell who copied that cassette tape. With the internet, you are given away by your ip address, giving the RIAA a basis to sue, and I fully believe it is simply to use their legal muscle to gain even more cash through the legal system.
Where would we be without the middle-men? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, usually when someone tries to screw every party in an attempt to line their pockets, they tell the artists that they are trying to make more moeny, so they can give more to the artists, and they tell the consumer that they are trying to lower prices so they can be competitive
Not here, however. Now they are pretty honest about their intentions. They want to give those who produce music the shaft on what they consider to be their biggest money-maker, and they are doing it so they can make more money...No noble intent, no "starving people in Hollywood" scenarios...just greed... I wonder if the brief ever mentioned the RIAA's desire to do a Scrooge McDuck-style swim in a pool full of money...
The recording industry is a bunch of middle-men, plain and simple. They are trying to screw artists and collect taxes on everything related to music, because they know that the only thing they have going for them is that their parent companies own the music stores, which are, also, not doing very well.
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
what is to stop Sally Sandbone from taking the Latest Madonna (or other) song and calling it her own?
Copyright law.
Who is going to go after the protection of content for the content provider?
The original artist's attorney? The RIAA is not required to enforce copyright law. In fact, they probably aren't going to come to the rescue of the "lowly" pianists at Nordstrom's. (I say this being a working musican for the past 25yrs.) The RIAA does not protect content creators! They are only concerned with stockholders profits. This article is a prime example of that fact.Re:This could be a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
The internet where everyone is a publisher is changing the landscape. There are a few acts everyone is familiar with even though they got no MTV or Clearchannel airtime. My Space, YouTube, Google Video, and others are starting to give the cartel a run for the money.
Are you still doubting? Ever heard of the Numa Numa guy? Has he ever been on MTV or a Clear Channel station?
How about the dancing baby?, the Badger or Lama song?
Re:one would hope... (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't facilities per se, it's the capital to book time at a A-List facility with the amenities, such as a room where you can turn it up to 11 or an engineer who has 20 years of experience and knows where the mikes go, as well as the cuttiing-edge technology. That being said lot of people are doing a lot of work at home: demos, vanity projects, composition/arrangement, pre-production, and self-publishing. Cutting-edge technology starts in the studios and within five years becomes available for semi-pros working at home at low cost. At home, no sweat, you can have better sound capture, shaping, and playback equipment than Sam Phillips had for Elvis Presley, then Geoff Emerick had for the Beatles.
A recording label offers four things: sensibility, marketing, distribution, and capital. Successful independents may have less of the last one and "more" of the first. Because big labels have enough capital to fund a lot of failures, I think they have less sensibility -- in any case, there's less risk-taking at the big five (or is it four this year?). In theory, a label signs an artist because the label thinks its audience will buy things the artist records. Again, at the big label level, because of all the capital and politics, deals happen all the time where the artist never releases a single track and somebody knew that was going to happen at the time they approved the deal.
Moving tracks, even giving them away, is tough. Every day when commuting I walk through a half dozen guys near Hollywood's Graumman's Chinese offering free discs and headphones in order that people listen to their discs. The encouraging news is that there are still a few places on the radio and many on the internet which play music because the dj likes it and not because there's a deal some where. The better news is that, just like in the 50s when Chuck Berry wrote about mailing a letter to the local dj, web sites and e-mail addresses now exist where one can ask "what was it that was played," or "where can I buy it," or, "here's something that maybe you'd like to put on the air." The last couple of weeks I've been listening to KCSN out of California State University at Northridge and this seems to be exactly what's happening.
Ask me, the two biggest mistakes that the big labels made were to insist on DRM on all internet sold tracks and to get the US federal government to institute a draconian rights fee that drove out specialty internet radio broadcasters in the late 90s. The record companies need fans and those fans occur, not because the artist is having a 48 hour news cycle about choices in underwear, but because people hear the music. It's in Clive Davis' 20+ year old book for chrissakes, when people hear good music, they'll go out of their way to get it.
Back to today's topic: because the record companies cannot get Apple to raise its prices, they are trying to codify their under-paying of artist and publishing royalties in order to avoid the question of how to replace the revenue lost because customers may now pass on those weak tracks that were part of the package. It is a show business pattern to try and sell the B material by packaging it with the A material, so we can cut them some slack on that. The industry used to make their nut on the sales of 45s and the albums were the gravy. But consolidation, trimming rosters, and going to the government to change the rules (royalties, extension of copyright on British recordings) in order to artificially extend the 60s, 70s, and 80s strikes me as foolish, mainly because the audience changed. Today's teen-ager and young adult has a different pop culture. When the zeitgeist changes, get back to singles. Make lots of them quickly, for low-cost and make them so it doesn't kill you when a hundred fail. Get back to having a roster of hungry and talented producers, writers, studio musicians, and artists, producing items for hire and throw them together in Monday morning pitch sessions which cull the singles from the demos. Remember how Motown went from one person to the soundtrack for a time; remember that being the soundtrack for a time is a three decade business plan.
Re:Nice! (Score:3, Insightful)
To Rephrase (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
slightly deceptive. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, their margins are "low" at 2%/8%, but low margins does no refute a claim that they are making a "huge profit." Using your reference, warner claimed $3,500,000,000.00 in revenue last year, or (on a 2% profit margin) $70,000,000.00 in profit.
Of course they claim to have earned $1,690,000,000.00 in (gross) profit this year, just a few lines down from their revenue statement. Margins are only important when they begin to scrape around the 1-0% ratio (or lower) where they are spendng nearly as much as they take in. On a buisiness that focuses on volume, margins don't need to be high. Look at wal-mart.
-GiH
Gigs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a misrepresentation of Metallica's position. Metallica has always had a relaxed attitude towards bootlegs. They even allowed people to plug their tape recorders into the mixing desk at concerts. They just asked that nobody copied their studio recorded music - you know, the recordings that are an expense to Metallica and their primary means of income. I considered it a reasonable request at the time; they weren't saying you couldn't make your own MP3s, or even trade their bootlegs, only that you didn't trade the studio recordings.
Metallica was one of the first bands to offer high quality digital content to their fans, as a bonus download off their website when you bought their CDs. They have made available video and music files recorded at their concerts, all for free. They publish a huge quantity of material; a balance of music, video, movies and other paraphenalia that rewards those fans who want to know more about Metallica. Their concerts are amazing value for money; high energy and extremely well produced. Metallica treat their fans very well. In return they ask that you don't rip them off.
The meme that "Metallica is anti MP3" is up there with "Gore invented the Internet" and "sue McDonalds for making coffee". It's a stupid lie that just won't die.
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
The chinese have been depriving the invading hordes from their God given profit. The Raiding Industry Association of Mongolia was heard commenting thusly: "But, but, no raping and pillaging and plundering? They are stealing our IP - Indigenous Property. Remember, every unharmed chinese is a lost looting opportunity for us."
Copyright is wastly backwards thinking and harmful for our society. Taking a more serious note for a bit, copyright reminds me of an old hungarian law.
One of our kings in 1351 created the law of aviticum. It banned any kind of sale/transfer of land, ownership was on hereditary basis. In those times it actually was for a good reason - to prevent the fragmentation of the country and to prevent a stronger lord from coercing a smaller one, in other words to reduce infighting. This law remained in effect until 1848. By that time it was a big problem for more than a century, as it prevented any kind of capitalistic development.
Copyright is actually worse. It not only does not have a reason to exist, not only is it detrimental, but it has been made worse since the 18th century in relation to the purpose it served.
In today's world there are no extraordinary costs to publish something. Distribution costs - which copyright was intended to overcome - are much smaller today, down to next to nothing with digital distribution. The only incentive should be the demand of the free market, there is no need for the government to step in anymore. Monopoly is bad and it is hurting us. Important parts of our culture are lost and we're only beginning to feel its effects now. Copyright rests on a false assumption, that you're creating something. You're not creating, you're improving on/evolving something, unless you want to reinvent the wheel all the time.
The impossibility to create derivative works is hurting us. The trivial example is what Walt Disney could do in the 20s, we cannot do now. It is hard to imagine the extent of harm we're experiencing due to copyright.
If we would draw a parallel to the world of mathematics, if you would have to restart from scratch all the time, if you would have to use different methods for solving problems than the optimal because that is forbidden to us, etc. That is the state copyright pushed what falls under it. Time to get rid of this archaic shit too.
smacks of the studio system (Score:4, Insightful)
-my drachma
Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
By all means, point me to them.
I've gone through a laundry list of non-RIAA sites, and the vast majority of it is 3 people who can't write, play, or sing, repeating 10 seconds of chords and absolutly mindless lyrics for 4 minutes.
I spent a couple days on music.download.com, getting a couple GBs worth of the highest ranked artists in Rock/Metal/etc. After listening to it all, over the course of a couple weeks, I determined that 90%+ of it was painfully lowsy crap, that a teen-aged garage band would be ashamed of.
The last 10%, which I've kept, is, at best, utterly mediocre and mundane (same old guitar riffs, same old drum rythm, same old verse chorus verse, same old mindless lyrics about nothing at all).
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
The artists already pay for everything from manufacturing, to office work, to supplies, everything. If they make any money the RIAA takes it. The only time they make money is when they are a big hit. They are just stealing more money from those that might make a profit. It basically puts an artists/band longer in the red. That's why they gave contracts to so many musicians. They knew the musicians would have to pay them back even if the albums failed. This just holds back the possibility of going into the black.