TechFest Northwest is the 2 year-old self-described “little sister” to the long-running Music Fest Northwest held every fall in Portland, Oregon. One track of TFNW’s first day this year was dedicated to the relationship between art and technology, with music and musicians taking a prominent place. Although one afternoon panel was provocatively titled “Technology killed […]
If you subscribe to our weekly newsletter, you’ve got access to Paul Riismandel’s summary of the latest salvos between musicians, radio stations, and Pandora over performance royalties. Paul notes that everything in this debate is contested, including how much musicians should be paid for each Pandora “spin” of a song, how to calculate those payments, […]
SoundExchange put out a happy face press release on Thursday, announcing that the performance royalty distributor has paid out no less than $204.4 million to artists and their representatives in the first two quarters of 2012. But attention through most of the week has focused on Representative Jerrold Nadler’s (D-NY) rather contorted effort to correct […]
“Bad Romance,” by Lady Gaga, would bring in over $446,000 a year if the Performance Rights Act was enacted by Congress, according to a new assessment by the Government Accountability Office. The proposed legislation would require broadcast radio stations to pay a royalties to performers as well as copyright holders. “As the primary musician on […]
Everybody is in a dither over whether the National Association of Broadcasters and the Recording Industry Association of America are going to cut a deal in which they both agree to the Performance Rights Act, if Congress mandates that all mobiles have to include FM radios. I can’t see why lawmakers would want to do […]
From the pages of Essence and the Huffington Post, Radio One’s Kathy Hughes and singer Dionne Warwick take potshots over the Performance Rights Act. African American station owner Hughes is decidedly con on the proposed law, which would require over-the-air radio signals to compensate performers as copyright law has them pay royalties to song copyright […]
Responding to a Congressional request for negotiations over the Performance Rights Act, the National Association of Broadcasters says it’s ready to chat, sort of. “NAB is of course willing to talk with members of Congress on this issue and any issue that could negatively impact the ability of free and local hometown radio stations to […]
A Texas radio station manager has told the Federal Communications Commission that even though he’s boycotting musicians who support the Performance Rights Act, he’ll play PRA advocate MusicFIRST’s public service announcements over his station. “I have removed all songs of artists that are part of musicFirst and will not play their songs for now,” KXIT […]
If you listen to Pandora internet radio, you probably got a message yesterday from the service’s founder Tim Westergren, asking subscribers to support the Performance Rights Act. That’s the proposed law that would require terrestrial radio stations to pay performance royalty fees to the artists whose music they broadcast. “The system as it stands today […]
In his excellent post yesterday, Matthew talked about the latest news on the Performance Rights Act. Just as an addendum to that, I wanted to point out some of the specific concerns that college radio stations have over this proposed legislation. An article yesterday on WKOWTV.com, “Radio Stations Threaten to Switch to Talk, Shut Down,” […]
