The bill that would create a new performance royalty for recording artists in the United States looks like it has majority opposition in the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, this seems to be the result of the same fallacious arguments that anti-performance royalty apologists have been spouting for awhile.

“‘The members of Congress just simply aren’t buying the argument that radio stations ought to be taxed to make up for the struggling business model of the record labels,’ NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton told the Associated Press Tuesday.”

This is a classic fallacy of straw man. The recording right should not be created because the recording industry simply needs more money, but because it is the morally correct thing to do. As I’ve written previously, the radio industry generates plenty of revenue from their advertisers. This is a well-established model that has proven to be very successful. In order to generate this revenue, they require content to broadcast. That is simply a normal cost of doing business.

No one would think twice about this in any other industry; the reality is that the recording industry has been so demonized due to the actions of major labels that even the House has been unbelievably biased.

Would they mandate that J.J. Abrams pay ABC when LOST is aired? After all, ABC helps him get DVD sales for his show, right? This inane logic can be extended to any number of situations where any rational person would reject it instantly. The same critical thinking should be applied to the music business.

Here’s another tidbit from Wharton:

“‘If this issue were about ‘fairness to artists,’ ” he continued, ‘why would 50% of the proceeds from this new fee go directly to the record labels? Aren’t these the same record labels that have abused artists for decades?’”

This could be described as ad hominem, another logical fallacy. Rephrased, “major record labels are bad, therefore they’re wrong and shouldn’t be supported.” Bzzt. Bogus reasoning. This isn’t a criminal or civil proceeding where a judge and jury are trying to decide what party gets a monetary reward.

It doesn’t matter if some record labels have acted in bad judgment (not to mention the vast majority of music being released is not on major labels, so to imply that all labels should be punished for the actions of a few is a fallacy unto itself.)

This is the creation of legislation. In this country, we extend legal and Constitutional protection even to those who have not obeyed the law in the past. In fact, those are the instances where fairly and equally applying protections matters the most. Yes, some labels in the history of recording industry have engaged in scare tactics and underhanded legal maneuvers. They’ve certainly ripped off artists.

However, when we can determine the moral necessity of a given right, we must extend that right to everyone.

Should radio pay a performance royalty to artists? [accessAtlanta]

Tags: performing royalty, royalty issues, traditional radio

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 1:11 am and is filed under Industry trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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]

Tags: performing royalty, royalty issues, traditional radio

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Industry trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.