Record Industry Blues: asinine

Thursday, 15 October 2009

More asinine demands from ASCAP - Ringtones!

Not content with trying to get royalty payments from the 30 second song samples that many of us use to decide if a song is worth buying, now ASCAP (or should that be "ass cap") is suing American phone provider AT&T over ringtone revenue, according to Ars Technica.

Note that it's not the RIAA donning the dunce cap in this case!

The reason for the ASCAP lawsuit? Apparently everytime a ringtone goes off and someone wants to kill the phone owner for having the worst song on earth as a ringtone, that ringtone is a public performance and requires a royalty payment.

Just when you thought the barrel couldn't be scraped any further.

Now I really don't understand why it's only AT&T who are "at fault" here, but that's not really the point. The annoying 10 second loop of whatever "song" some 15 year old downloaded is a) not a public performance of any merit and b) not controlled by a phone company. Not unless they start making our phones ring... which would answer the question Deacon Blue once posed.

EFF's Fred von Lohman expands the crazy demands from ASCAP to a more natural conclusion, "if a ringtone constitutes a public performance, then so does playing the car radio when the windows are down."

It does look like the American legal system is siding with common sense on this as Verizon were recently cleared of any royalty wrong doings as well.

I guess ASCAP are going to have to continue to put their faith in whatever brainless moron is driving their current "new income" initiative. Maybe suing people who whistle for royalty payments?

Thursday, 17 September 2009

30 second royalties

The latest entry in the "most asinine way the music industry can prove it's not got a clue" was unveiled today.

Complaining that royalties from downloads aren't high enough the usual group of idiotic Americans are now pushing for a royalty payment on 30 second samples. Yeah, the same 30 second samples that might actually get you to want to part with money - i.e. the marketing tool musicians have to sway your interest from the sea of other music out there.

So, ASCAP, BMI, etc. want to charge royalties on these, and the likes of Amazon and iTunes are just going to close up the sample shop and go home. All of a sudden, the long tail buyers who aren't swayed are still going to stay unswayed and more music doesn't get purchased.... or a person turns to bittorrent or other p2p to be able to sample the wares before they buy.

Hell, in the old world model the buying of music was based around sampling the goods. All the old record shops had listening booths where you could listen before you buy. When CDs became the norm, you'd routinely find banks of CD players down your local HMV where you could skim through a disc before buying it.

Did royalties ever get paid on these? Of course not, as the purchase you made would negate that.

As Mashable rightly point out, this is nothing more than sheer greed!

As they point out, "since when did it become smart business to spend time and money actively preventing your potential customers from finding out if they want to give you money or not? It’s unfortunate that in the shift to a digital media ecosystem licensing agencies are getting squeezed, but some of these tactics reek of desperation."

At least it's not the record labels proving they're idiots this time, merely the royalty collecting agencies trying to justify their existence in a world of ever slimming royalty payments.

It's all a moot point anyway, as the smaller acts - the ones these agencies are there to protect - are usually the first to get shafted anyway. This way you sample some Madonna track before you buy and she gets a double payday. Nice for the small guy.