Interview: MusicFIRST Coalition. Should Radio Have to Buy the Cow When They've Always Gotten the Artists' Milk For Free?

This scenario is exactly what musicians face with AM/FM radio. As it currently stands in the United States, music artists are not paid a royalty by terrestrial radio for the use of their work on the air. Though other media including satellite and internet radio pay a fee to artists to syndicate their music, AM/FM radio has continually escaped this obligation. However, the MusicFIRST Coalition is dead set on reforming what they see as a gap in the system. Armed with the support of more than 160 music artists, the echos of Frank Sinatra and the precedent set by other countries, they aim to pass legislation that implements a performance right for working musicians and forces radio to pay royalties to those who create their content.

But aren’t recording artists rich enough already? Doesn’t radio promote the sale of music, so in fact help the artists? Wouldn’t this bankrupt the radio stations, which no one pays to consume?

We assembled a sampling of Coalition members that passed through Chicago on a tour last week to address these questions and enlighten us on why this reform is important.

• Tod Donhauser: Spokesperson for the MusicFIRST Coalition.

• Peter Strand: A musician, a music attorney, an intellectual property attorney, and currently serving as the president of the Chicago chapter of the Recording Academy.

• John Simson: Executive Director of SoundExchange, the organization that currently collects the royalties that internet radio, satellite radio and cable radio pay. A former recording artist and manager. Helped lobby to get the 1995 law passed which provided for the very first performance right that U.S. performers do have, which is just for digital cable and satellite.

• Alice Peacock: A singer/songwriter and recording artist, past president of the Chicago chapter of the Recording Academy, an advocate and a MusicFIRST member.

Chicagoist: What is the purpose of MusicFIRST, and why people should support it?

Tod Donhauser: The issue here that we’re talking about today is that when artists’ performances are broadcast on terrestrial radio, be it AM or FM dial, they’re not compensated. There’s no royalty payment for them. What we’re asking for is fairness. First and foremost fairness to the artists. They should be compensated when their intellectual property is used, but also fairness across platforms because it’s a bit of an anomaly that AM/FM radio is the only platform that doesn’t pay its royalties. So if a song is broadcast on the internet or through webcasting, if it’s broadcast via satellite, Sirius or XM, or if it’s broadcast on a music channel on cable television, they’re paying a royalty for that music. And in fact, even radio stations that are broadcasting today and simultaneously webcasting are paying a royalty to webcast, but they’re not paying a royalty to artists to use that music.

They’re generating 16 billion dollars a year in advertising revenue on the backs of hard-working musicians. And that’s not just the lead singers or the most famous musicians that we have to think about, the Christina Aguileras of the world, it’s the background singers, the session musicians that are participating...It really takes a lot of people.

John Simson: Songwriters get paid every time their song is played somewhere in public. Performers get nothing. When you hear Aretha Franklin singing “Respect,” she’s getting nothing, and Otis Redding’s estate is getting paid because he wrote the song.

Peter Strand: The Righteous Brothers song, 'You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,' which was released about 1965, it’s a mainstay of every oldies station in the country...I can’t vouch for this statistic but I read once that it’s been played on broadcast radio 50 million times. Five-o million performances over the 43 years it’s been around. [Note: Wikipedia claims 8 million performances, but dubs it the most played song in radio history.] The Righteous Brothers and the record company have made exactly nothing from those performances. The songwriters are richer than God. They’ve done very well because there are two intellectual properties: there’s the sound recording and there’s the song, and the song is covered. The radio stations have always argued that they promote the records and help drive sales, which is true at the beginning of the life of the record. But for The Righteous Brothers to not get paid in 2008 for a record that was paid for in 1965 is kind of outrageous.

And it’s free content for the radio station. We’re not talking about community radio where there’s no advertising, we’re talking about and Clearchannel and Evergreen and ABC and all those that make billions of revenue. Think of any business model where what your selling comes to you for free, you just put a price tag on it and deliver to the public.

C: How is it that AM/FM radio continues to escape the obligation to pay performers a royalty?

JS: The broadcasters are such a powerful lobby that to get the right in 1995, they said 'The only way we’ll let you have this is if we’re grandfathered, and not only don’t we have to pay as traditional AM/FM stations, but when we go to HD radio, we don’t have to pay then either.'

If you look at the history, there are three major anomalies and inequities that this shows. One is we are the only country. If you look at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, it’s an organization of 30 free-market, democratic societies, out of the 30 countries in that organization, 29 of them have a performance right for recording artists and one doesn’t, the United States.

[Second] Of all the copyrights in the United States that can be publicly performed, the sound recording is the only one without a full performance right.

[Third] And then when you look at radio platforms, internet radio pays, satellite radio pays, cable radio pays. Only over-the-air radio doesn’t pay. So those are three really basic issues.

TD: Some of these big corporations that run multiple stations across the country and internationally, not only do they pay when they webcast but they pay in foreign countries as well. So there’s this corporate radio loophole here in the United States they’re trying to maintain. That’s what we’re arguing needs to be closed. It’s unfair to people like Alice Peacock that when her music is played on the radio and she’s not compensated for her intellectual property.

C: How much money are we talking about here that you feel artists should get paid?

Alice Peacock: Terrestrial radio is an 18 billion dollar a year industry, something like that. In the U.K. they figure over [the course of] a year they pay about 5 percent.

The radio industry is based on free content, and it’s a very healthy industry. Of concern for me and for us, there were a couple things I was concerned about [regarding the legislation]. I’m not only a performer but I’m also a songwriter, so one is that songwriters rights would be preserved, and they are. There are no harmful effects for songwriters in this bill as well as non-commercial radio, public radio, college radio, things like that. They are not harmed...

For me, as an artist, it really was a fairness issue, and that’s why I got involved. I feel like I represent that great middle class of working artists. I’m not Beyoncé, but Beyoncé deserves to be paid for her songs as well because people buy her stuff. When a bus goes by and it has Beyoncé on the side, it’s kind of promoting the radio station. People are listening to that radio station because Beyoncé’s on that radio station. It’s her voice...

What were fighting for is just the performance royalty right. That we have it in place. It’s not about the amount just yet.

JS: One of the key issues for U.S. performers is that the United States creates the repertoire for the world. 30 to 50 percent of music played in most other countries is American music. Now, these other countries all have a performance right, or at least most of them do. China doesn’t have one, North Korea doesn’t have one, Iraq doesn’t have one, so we’re in good company not having a performance right. These are not exactly countries that have been stalwarts of intellectual property protection...It’s a real problem. It’s a balance of trade issue. What happens is this U.S. repertoire gets played in other countries, they collect millions and millions of dollars, and then they go, ‘Well you’re not paying our performers in the United States, so we’re going to keep your money here in our country.’ U.S. performers are probably losing a hundred million dollars a year, if not more, overseas. So if we were to get a right here, immediately there would be a flow of money coming in, and this is performer only money, for our recording artists, that would be coming in here to the United States.

Again, this is about getting the right. This is about saying, ‘I created something, it should be my decision.’ Radio stations say, ‘We promote you, we promote you...’ but if you take that logic, movie studios would be able to take John Grisham’s book and say, ‘We promote you so we’re not going to pay for the movie rights. We’re going to help you sell more books.’

AP: I played Ravinia a couple of weeks ago...if the promoter at the end of the night had said, ‘Hey Alice, we got you in front of a lot of people and you sold some CDs, and that was really great promotion, we’re just not going to pay you,’ that just wouldn’t fly. So the promotion argument, it rings a little hollow in that yes, radio is promotion but I receive promotion in a lot of different ways in my career. It [radio] is just one piece of the puzzle, and I am compensated for those other parts.

C: Considering recent issues with Napster and the crackdown on piracy, how does this issue of a performance right imposed on radio relate, considering the whole idea behind that movement was that it’s unfair to get music for free?

JS: One thing that I think it’s important to note about Napster, not them specifically but as a general idea, is that we’re going through a massive technological shift in the way that we consume music. We used to be in a culture where you heard a song on the radio, say 20 years ago, and you ran out to the store and you bought it. There were great record stores and you could sit there and you’d look through the bins and find other things that had a cool cover and go, ‘Wow, let me try this!’ and it was a great thing. I think what we’re seeing now is, first of all the record stores are gone. Earlier we had Bruce Iglauer with us of Alligator Records, a great Chicago blues label, and he was saying, ‘You know, this is killing this business because there are no longer any stores that carry catalogue.’ So what we’re really seeing here is a shift where the paradigm is no longer you run out and buy...there are people are now paying 12 bucks a month to have satellite radio and they’re getting 70 channels of great music, which is frankly probably satisfying a lot of their urge. They don’t need to purchase music, they’re hearing great music on 70 different channels. And we’ve even seen statistics that show that satellite radio customers now buy fewer CDs.

AP: When we have a performance right, when that is given...we don’t know how we’re going to consume music in the future but until we have that performance right we aren’t protected.

Really for me it’s a fairness issue. Ultimately it’s about what’s fair, and the fact that I’m paid in all other formats for my music but I’m not in terrestrial radio, the fact that we’re the only country in the free trade world that doesn’t have a parity, we’re on a sad, sorry list of other countries that don’t do this. To me it’s a moral issue. And it’s exciting because we’ve had a lot of good response in front of the judiciary and it’s been built and introduced, and we’ve got a lot of supporters and there’s a lot of good energy about it. I feel like the time has come. This has been something brewing for years. We have a lot of artists getting involved in MusicFIRST and I think as things move along we’re going to have a flood of artists. I think people are going to sign on and maybe it’s sort of safety in numbers too in some ways because no one wants to take one the big bad N.A.B. [National Association of Broadcasters].

C: How close are you to getting this bill passed and what obstacles are still standing in your way?

TD: Right now we’re exactly where we want to be. We’ve made a lot of great progress and there’s a lot of interest in Congress, but the one lynchpin is just awareness. It’s making sure people on Capitol Hill are aware, and just making sure the general public is aware that this is an issue out there that needs to be addressed. And when people come to understand that this is a fundamental issue of fairness, that artists should be compensated for the production of their intellectual property and that manifested into performance on terrestrial radio, they say, ‘Well of course they should be. Why should there be an exemption for radio?’ I think increasing public awareness is a key and that’s something we’re going to continue to push.

We have 160 artists within the MusicFIRST Coaliton and a lot of other people that are supporting it, and I think the really unique thing about this piece of legislation..is that we have support from both Republicans and Democrats, we support from both liberals and conservatives, we have support from the unions, we have support from the labels. So it’s really across the spectrum on all fronts.

JS: One of the most recent country to adopt a performance right was Canada. They adopted it in 1998, so it’s very recent. At first broadcasters there were gloom and doom, saying ‘If you put this into place it’s going to hurt songwriters, it’s going to hurt radio, we’re all going to talk radio...’ [However], private radio stations are thriving, they’ve been growing faster than ever before. Songwriters’ royalties have gone up...and the performer royalties are being paid. So, it’s been a win/win for everyone in Canada, so they [the broadcasters] may not like having to pay an additional fee, but it hasn’t hurt their business.

To find out more information on MusicFIRST including ways to become involved, visit www.musicfirstcoalition.org.