Apparently, record labels, recording artists and performers have it all wrong. Not only should artists not be compensated when radio stations play their music, but it should in fact be the other way around! Labels are “ripping off” radio, according Tony Coloff, who claims he feels “feel like a waitress who gave the greatest service. But the customer doesn’t pay — a gross injustice. Then, even more incredibly, the customer demands payment from the waitress. An absolute outrage.”
Coloff goes on to say that it is actually radio stations that “create intellectual property.” Not, you know, songwriters and musicians. You see, radio is the only thing that “created value” in recordings, so they should own them.
It’s hard to even know where to begin with such a specious argument, but let’s start with the basics. First of all, Coloff seems to conveniently forget that radio stations get their revenue from advertisers. That is the entire business model of radio, and for that matter, television as well. Radio stations collectively make billions upon billions of dollars per year because, as Coloff himself pointed out, radio still has a massive audience and a 98% exposure rate.
Put simply, without its content, namely music, radio stations would have no audience and no advertising dollars. The waitress analogy makes no sense, because the “customer” of the radio station isn’t the record label. The label is, more accurately, the CHEF - the person who makes the food which brings people to the restaurant to begin with. And restaurants pay the people who prepare their food.
So, I guess by Coloff’s logic, magazine and newspaper columnists should be paying their employers. Television production companies should pay television stations to broadcast their programs. This makes absolutely no sense. It doesn’t even begin to make sense.
If your business model revolves around providing a free or extremely inexpensive product filled with content, and monetizing that content through advertising, then logically you would pay the people who are giving you the content that enables this business model to work at all. This is such a basic concept to understand that it’s almost unbelievable that an adult could twist it so much.
As for the belief that radio stations should own the intellectual property that they broadcast, again, that’s so far off the mark as to be almost offensive. Even if radio stations created value in recordings - which they don’t, they merely expose recordings which have intrinsic value - this has nothing to do with intellectual property. Should a book publicist be considered the co-author, or even the author of the book she promotes? Should grocery stores be entitled to the formulas and recipes of food products (a form of intellectual property) because they advertise them in circulars? This suggestion is beyond stupid.
Coloff and other radio advocates like him are only able to get away with posting such obviously nonsensical and illogical arguments because they are using a logical fallacy which is often effective: “Person A believes Idea X, and Person A is bad, so therefore Idea X is wrong.” One typically sees this in political discourse as a basic smear tactic, but it makes no sense. A murderer can state that rape is wrong, and he’d be correct. His status as a murderer has no bearing on his statement.
Likewise, the RIAA advocates a performance royalty in radio. They are correct. Just because they’re a generally sleazy organization with widely-unpopular legal tactics and a bad public image doesn’t mean that everything they support is wrong.
Don’t succumb to the vapid arguments of Coloff and others like him.
Why the Record Labels Are Wrong [Radio World]
It’s not almost offensive. It IS offensive.
Wow, what an embarrassing article. This is what the defenders have restored to.
It’s not the radio station that made famous artists who they are, it’s the work of the labels. It’s the labels that played the song 12 times a day, ensuring that an artist will be given exposure.
It’s not radio that has sustained the careers of acts decades after their labels dropped them because they didn’t look 19 and didn’t thrust their chests out in a video.
It’s not college radio that endlessly hypes small groups from New York to Menomoniee to get the info out about new music. Those little non-profit stations deserve to fork out a significant portion of their budget because they helped promote the up and coming.
It’s not the labels, who will get even more cash from this scam if it passes, who make sure most artists will never see the majority of the money they earn. It’s not the labels that buy out the rights to musicians songs so they’ll never see a dime from their work in the ensuing decades.
It’s the radio station who helped ensure that an average artist gets less than a nickel when someone downloads their song on Itunes.
It’s not the artist who hears their song on the radio for the first time who is calling all of his friends. It’s the radio station that is humbled by the honor of playing an obscure band for the first time.
The RIAA is wrong, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Currently we have a win-win situation with the labels vs. radio. If the labels wish to extort more money out of stations - who are already paying for the music they play - we’ll see a tipping point. Unlike Aversa’s assertions, we won’t see stations begging the greasier musicians and RIAA to play their music. We’ll see them drop music formats all together. The bigger and greedier CC stations will find a way around this to survive — and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them cut deals with labels to get out of this. Others will either switch formats or simply go off the air. We saw it with small Internet radio, and we’ll see it with small stations.
Thankfully it looks like just enough Representatives have seen through the money grab. Don’t worry, I’m sure someone will attempt to hike up the fees on Internet Radio again in a few years. Remember, radio should be indebted to play the wonderful artists they helped create.
I agree with the intellectual property part, and agree it is an interesting dependency they have on each other. But imagine if no one came to your “restaurant”, except for the people who got to taste your Chef’s wonderful cooking at one of many “Free” sample booths around town. Would you want those samplers to go away.
David: You forget that radio stations ALREADY get paid - by advertisers. In fact, as an industry, they generate billions of dollars per year - all without any money from the labels. People that defend the radio industry conveniently forget this fact in every opinion piece I’ve ever seen. How do you think radio would survive without music? That’s essentially their “product”; no product, no advertisers. The radio industry is built around content (which, to a large extent, is music) and they should pay for that content. It’s extremely simple.
Don’t forget that the radio is a dying industry anyways and won’t be around too much longer, just like news papers. Yes, their business model is built around a product which is predominantly music, but what’s happening with their listeners. They are shutting off the radio and plugging in their portable media players or streaming XM, Pandora, and Last.fm via incredibly fast wi-fi and 3G networks.
Radio is not making what it once was as more advertisers begin to realize that listeners are tuning out. So it doesn’t even matter if the radio is taxed additionally or not, as all it will do is perpetuate radio station bankruptcy.
Radio is a dying industry and a tired business model.