the music monopoly

I’ve been learning a little bit about the music business from working on Candace Corrigan’s fabulous new web radio show and podcasting site, The Nashville Nobody Knows, and it’s been quite an eye opener. If you’re in the music business, you’re living in a communist country. Candace’s show features interviews with artists, engineers, executives, and other people in the biz, plus song recordings that are talked about in the interview. In order to be legal, we have to pay yearly fees to ASCAP and BMI. Even though we pay the fees, there are restrictions, like, for instance, we can’t mention the name of the song that is inside the interview, anywhere on the site, or we’ll get in trouble with the RIAA. And we’re supposed to keep a log of when and how many times each interview containing a song is accessed.

Here’s how the radio networks and record labels, with a little help from their congressional friends, have set things up. In order to get airplay for a record on mainstream radio, you have to come up with around 200 grand in payola. Oh of course they don’t call it payola. That would be illegal. You don’t pay the radio stations directly. You pay a “promoter” who turns around and buys “services” from the radio station, and, incidentally, mentions your record. The services they buy are such things as getting a copy of the station’s playlist. The radio stations in turn have to pay ASCAP and BMI for the right to play the records. A tiny bit of this money dribbles down to the artist. The rest is sucked up by ASCAP, BMI, and the record labels. The effect of this arrangement is to raise a very high barrier to entry for anyone wanting to be an artist, a record label, or a radio station. If you want to be in the game, you have to come up with non-productive wads of cash, and an expensive infrastructure to keep logs, make reports, fill out forms, etc.

On the one hand, artists are willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money, just for the chance to get some airplay. On the other hand, radio stations are supposed to pay for the privilege of airing the same music. Which is it? Are the stations helping the record labels by playing their music, and therefore deserve their payola? Or are the record labels helping the radio stations by giving them music, and therefore deserve to get paid for it? Both, and neither. It’s really one hand washing the other. By moving this money back and forth, the labels and the radio networks build a high wall around their monopolies. With the money that’s left over, they pay off our congressional representatives who provide the laws that make it all possible.

And then of course there’s the RIAA, the storm troopers of the music business, but that’s a whole other topic.

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