My friend wrote this, which I find covers the issue rather well.
When was this? I’m not trying to be a smartass, I’m just curious.
My bad. I thought it was a farm bill. I just did a bit of research, and it was a ‘technical amendment’ to the Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999.
The amendment changed all recorded music to be defined as ‘works for hire’. That means that they are owned in perpetuity by the recording companies, rather than reverting to the artists after the contract period expires, as I understand it. Previously, a recording was made under contract, with the copyright being held by the artists (like books).
The change was made by a congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier, after the hearings on the bill had closed. As I understand it, this is acceptible because ‘technical amendments’ are only supposed to do things like correct spelling or add references to a bill, and not substantively change it. So old Mitch stepped way over the line, and benefitted record companies to the tune of billions of dollars.
In an amazing coincidence, the RIAA hired Mitch Glazier to be its top lobbyist three months later. A pretty good gig for a former copy editor. And of course, with a sky-high salary.
First of all Number One hits today are substantially different from 5 years ago. A song like Olivia Newton-John’s Physical or Kim Carnes “Bette Davis Eyes” that stayed number one for 10 and 9 weeks respectively would have easily gone over 26 weeks under the new system.
A GOLD single was once one million sold. Now it is 500,000.
Airplay counts for a huge % of a single. Not sales.
Competition is weak. It is nothing to be number one when you are selling way less, but everyone else is just selling lessor.
Furthermore, good old Rock N Roll or POP music basically is dead. Todays Hot 100 is basically an urban and/or R&B repeats. Even in the height of the DISCO era you had country hits, slow, fast, rock.
Now you don’t
I asked my record dealer why on earth do they put Celine Dion in the R&B section. He said that is really where most people look now.
Record Industry has made us by 45s 33s, 8Track, Cassette, CD, Mini CD now MP3. Good god how many times do you have to buy that “Meet the Beatles” albumn.
Profits are ubsurd. I read Sheena Easton (one of my favorite singers) is worth 29 Million. Now come on.
Steve Kipner earned 2 million from writing “Physical”. He was one of TWO writers. So you can imagine how much the artist, much less the recording company made off the song.
The recording company? Lots. The artist? Dick-all. Songwriters make the profits, because the copyright system protects them. The performers make squat, because the music industry has figured out how to screw them over.
FYI The sound recordings being a works-for-hire thing was overturned in 2000.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c106:h5107.rds:
Mack, if it’s not an imposition, I’ve recently read an awful lot of articles proclaiming many dire consequences of the “Works For Hire” amendment - the original nasty one in 1999. What were the implications?
Basically what it boiled down to was that if an artist was in the employ of a recording company, everything the artist came up with belonged to the company.
It’s like a statement you might have signed when you joined whoever you work for that states that you agree that any technique or invention you come up with while working there belongs to the company - only the artists didn’t sign this particular statement, nor were they given the option. The law was changed instead.
Here are some details:
from http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#121
Mitch Glazer’s technical amendment inserted “as a sound recording” after “audiovisual work” in paragraph (2) of the above.
I hope this helps.
I hope to see the RIAA fall very soon. I’d like to see them slapped with anti-trust litigation.
The attack on internet radio is not a problem with the distribution of their music. It’s an attack on independently produced music. Internet radio was making independent music much more mainstream. We hear a lot of stuff we probably would never have heard otherwise via the internet. When we hear statistics about dropping record sales, it’s usually in regard to the RIAAs statistics and usually just related to the artists that “should” be selling well. So perhaps all those artists are going the way of the dinosaur, as well they should. That’s the evolution of music. If people don’t want to hear Mariah Carey anymore, who cares? They are listening to something else.
The example of Eminem is an excellent one. Dr. Dre was on the Metallica bandwagon early on with file sharing, yet his protege is selling millions of albums. I downloaded the Eminem Show two weeks before it came out and there were lots of copies on soulseek (the best filesharing program btw) prior to the album even being released. Eminem said on MTV that he didn’t get a promo copy and downloaded it from the internet, and was buying it at HMV because it sounded better than an mp3. This was obvious horseshit that he never received a promo if the promos got all over the internet.
On to a common fallacy. A CD sounds lightyears better than an mp3. This is completely untrue. You can create an mp3 of many different qualities and at the higher qualities you’d have to have an amazing stereo and a trained ear to tell the difference. This starts at about 160k, the average mp3 being 128k. A 128k mp3 sounds much better than a tape, and we all lived off of tapes for many years. Yes a CD is better quality, but the difference is so slight that 99% of listeners will never know the difference. A record sounds much better than a CD, yet we don’t see people railing against CDs and that’s a HUGE difference in sound quality when compared to the extremely minor one with mp3s. It’s basically marketing something only an audiophile would care about to your average listener, it’s total bullshit.
As has been mentioned there is no reason for Congress to be protecting an outmoded business model. Let the RIAA fall.
On to another pet peeve of mine. When was it decided that recording artists were better than the rest of us plebeians? One of my favorite artists, Raymond Watts, who is behind the band Pig as well as working on many other famous industrial bands most notably; KMFDM, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Foetus doesn’t earn that much money even though his die hard fans consider him one of the best parts of his many projects. He makes enough money to support his family from his music alone, he’s in his 40s at this point and has been producing music since the early 80s. Many bands such as Nine Inch Nails and many of the clones thereof would not be where they are without Raymond Watts, yet he is content to make ONLY enough to support his family and doesn’t even have a US recording contract because of all this bullshit, thereby making it really hard for me to get his albums which are all Japanese imports even though he’s written radio hits in the US like Juke Joint Jezebel. So when was it decided that artists DESERVE to be millionaires? Why do we feel sorry for artists that are not millionaires and claim them to be unsuccessful. Bands that many people have never heard of like Skinny Puppy, had a reunion show in 2000 and packed a crowd of 50,000 people in Germany, I don’t know about you but I see this as a benchmark for success even though these people are not millionaires and live a pretty standard middle class lifestyle as they get older.
So I guess my question is, why should we care if a musician makes millions? Why should they be able to live the rest of their life off of one hit? If they are washed up in their career why don’t we expect them to find another career like we would anyone else? The only reason I can see is lack of retirement benefits, but so many people work their entire lives in less glamorous fields and have the same issue. Hell, many of the world’s most famous painters died never once seeing enough money to live on.
And yes, I am a musician.
Erek
I hope to see the RIAA fall very soon. I’d like to see them slapped with anti-trust litigation.
The attack on internet radio is not a problem with the distribution of their music. It’s an attack on independently produced music. Internet radio was making independent music much more mainstream. We hear a lot of stuff we probably would never have heard otherwise via the internet. When we hear statistics about dropping record sales, it’s usually in regard to the RIAAs statistics and usually just related to the artists that “should” be selling well. So perhaps all those artists are going the way of the dinosaur, as well they should. That’s the evolution of music. If people don’t want to hear Mariah Carey anymore, who cares? They are listening to something else.
The example of Eminem is an excellent one. Dr. Dre was on the Metallica bandwagon early on with file sharing, yet his protege is selling millions of albums. I downloaded the Eminem Show two weeks before it came out and there were lots of copies on soulseek (the best filesharing program btw) prior to the album even being released. Eminem said on MTV that he didn’t get a promo copy and downloaded it from the internet, and was buying it at HMV because it sounded better than an mp3. This was obvious horseshit that he never received a promo if the promos got all over the internet.
On to a common fallacy. A CD sounds lightyears better than an mp3. This is completely untrue. You can create an mp3 of many different qualities and at the higher qualities you’d have to have an amazing stereo and a trained ear to tell the difference. This starts at about 160k, the average mp3 being 128k. A 128k mp3 sounds much better than a tape, and we all lived off of tapes for many years. Yes a CD is better quality, but the difference is so slight that 99% of listeners will never know the difference. A record sounds much better than a CD, yet we don’t see people railing against CDs and that’s a HUGE difference in sound quality when compared to the extremely minor one with mp3s. It’s basically marketing something only an audiophile would care about to your average listener, it’s total bullshit.
As has been mentioned there is no reason for Congress to be protecting an outmoded business model. Let the RIAA fall.
On to another pet peeve of mine. When was it decided that recording artists were better than the rest of us plebeians? One of my favorite artists, Raymond Watts, who is behind the band Pig as well as working on many other famous industrial bands most notably; KMFDM, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Foetus doesn’t earn that much money even though his die hard fans consider him one of the best parts of his many projects. He makes enough money to support his family from his music alone, he’s in his 40s at this point and has been producing music since the early 80s. Many bands such as Nine Inch Nails and many of the clones thereof would not be where they are without Raymond Watts, yet he is content to make ONLY enough to support his family and doesn’t even have a US recording contract because of all this bullshit, thereby making it really hard for me to get his albums which are all Japanese imports even though he’s written radio hits in the US like Juke Joint Jezebel. So when was it decided that artists DESERVE to be millionaires? Why do we feel sorry for artists that are not millionaires and claim them to be unsuccessful. Bands that many people have never heard of like Skinny Puppy, had a reunion show in 2000 and packed a crowd of 50,000 people in Germany, I don’t know about you but I see this as a benchmark for success even though these people are not millionaires and live a pretty standard middle class lifestyle as they get older.
So I guess my question is, why should we care if a musician makes millions? Why should they be able to live the rest of their life off of one hit? If they are washed up in their career why don’t we expect them to find another career like we would anyone else? The only reason I can see is lack of retirement benefits, but so many people work their entire lives in less glamorous fields and have the same issue. Hell, many of the world’s most famous painters died never once seeing enough money to live on.
And yes, I am a musician.
Erek
Erek, your sentiments have merit - without doubt.
And Mack, thank you for replying.
It seems to me the following situations exist which I shall atempt to codify as briefly as possible.
(1) Rightly or Wrongly, the U.S. is still the world’s most influential music market. Invariably, what becomes a hit in the U.S. becomes a hit in the rest of the English speaking world (at the very least).
(2) Some research I did yesterday showed just 2 artists in the TOP 30 on Boston’s “WBCN” radio station were from outside of the U.S. - this indicates that very little ‘outside’ quality music is currently getting ‘in’ to the U.S. via Commercial Radio. Insularity is rarely a good thing I’ve found.
(3) Rightly or Wrongly, Commercial Radio in the U.S. is STILL regarded as the single greatest medium for influencing ‘awareness’ of new music amongst the general population of the U.S.
(4) Rightly or Wrongly, via the middlemen known as “Independant Music Promoters”, hundreds of millions of dollars in payola STILL filter from Record Company’s to Commercial Radio stations in the U.S. each year. This has created a symbiotic relationship which NO party wishes to end.
(5) Rightly or Wrongly, the major Record Companies in the U.S. STILL control the major avenues of record distribution - via the Walmarts etc.
Some, or all, of these major factors are current ‘status quo’ which need to be shattered somehow.
As I wrote in an earlier post, I would dearly love to have a crystal ball on this matter.
My lovely American friends - please consider something. For the first time in history, the U.S. is no longer exporting the world’s best music - regardless that most of it is still being made there. Most American’s I’ve met are incredibly generous lovely people. I reckon this should be a cause of great sadness for you I think.