Performance Royalty Argument Spills Into The Pages of The New York Times

A couple of great articles in The New York Times referencing performance royalties on the same day — one about the radio battle, and another on how royalty hikes almost killed new media darling Pandora…

Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan Weighs In Regarding The Performance Royalty

We’ve weighed in on the performance royalty issue before. In short, we think it’s a lose-lose, with no good guy to root for in this battle.

On the radio side, nobody wants to root for huge consolidators who have severely screwed up the medium. We do want to protect mom and pops and pubradio, though.

On the record side, we all want to root for performers, but hardly shed tears for huge conglomerates, most of which aren’t even domestic companies anymore.

We’d love to see some middle ground on this, where radio stations pay a reasonable fee — perhaps akin to the ASCAP/BMI model. This could get artists paid, and keep record companies robust — which in turn does help radio, which benefits from record company artist development.

This is unlikely to happen. Record companies will over-reach. What many performance fee proponents don’t understand is that it’s just not the fee that will be the problem. Anyone who currently deals with SoundExchange knows that compliance with onerous reporting standards is a major nightmare with significant man-hour costs attached to it.

Interestingly, The New York Times carried two related stories in the Sunday, March 7 edition. One reports directly on the perfomance royalty battle, while the other is about Pandora’s numerous brushes with death — one of which involved royalty rate hikes. There’s a lesson in there.