In the grand tradition of self-defeating ideas like DRM, lawsuits against music fans and anachronistic pricing models comes the latest idea from the music biz: collecting royalties from music blogs. The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) has approached 3 music blogs, including Nialler9, to request the annual payment of hundreds of pounds to cover performance royalties. There's a good write up over at the Guardian.
In a way this should come as no surprise as here in the states ASCAP and BMI have gone as far as asking that iTunes and other music stores pay performance royalties for the 30 second preview clips consumers play to entice them to purchase a full track. If you can ask for performance royalties for that than in theory anything is open game.
Nialler9 is a great example of a blog with an international readership that promotes an otherwise largely undocumented local music scene. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if sites like this shutter, musicians from Ireland will get less exposure and be much worse off.
Like many mp3 blogs, Nialler9 posts mp3s with permission from copyright holders looking to promote gigs and full album downloads. But according to a Q&A between IMRO and nialler9 this doesn't matter:
--
Nialler9: If tracks are provided to bloggers with permission and are
cleared for promo from bands, labels are these covered by this or are
these outside the licence?
IMRO: According to IMRO, if an artist, composer or publisher has registered
with IMRO (or PRS in the UK / ASCAP in the US), then the MCPSI-IMRO
(LOEL) licence must be obtained. Furthermore, if a composer, artist or
publisher has done this, then they do not have the right to give full permission to allow their own track to be downloaded on a site.
--
But the silliest part of the exchange comes later:
--
Nialler9: Is it because Nialler9.com is hosted in Ireland or does it matter if a server is registered here or not?
IMRO: It doesn’t matter. If the site is made available in Ireland then a licence is required.
--
Will Pitchfork now need to pay up or stop posting mp3s by all Irish bands that signed up with IMRO? Or is IMRO proposing that Ireland erect the equivalent of the great firewall of China to keep all the music blogs out?
Somewhere out there Christopher Weingarten is cracking a Guinness.
I'm a music blogger who primarily posts approved mp3s (either sent to me by artists' representatives or made freely available by the label). I also occasionally post older songs that I do not clear (like, say, the Carter Family or the Fugs). My blog is strictly non-commercial (in fact, I even pay for my own file hosting, so I take a loss on it if you want to look at it that way).
Last year I received several "Dear Sir/Madam" emails from ASCAP -- at first inviting me to purchase a license ($288/yr plus a per-session charge) for my "business," then later threatening legal action if I did not purchase one. When I responded with questions, I never heard back from them.
I wasn't able to find anybody else in the blogger community who had been contacted, but this had all the earmarks of a fishing expedition.
(ASCAP has also tried to collect fees for music *embedded* YouTube videos that Google has already paid to license.)
In addition to ASCAP or BMI, the Harry Fox Agency also needs a cut -- they offer "mechanical licenses," which I think means the license for the recording, as opposed to the song. Currently rates appear to be 10 cents per copy (or download).
If all the licensing agencies were collecting on the freely-available promo mp3s, it's easy to imagine most music blogs shutting down and the independent-music industry tanking as a result. Which, I guess, is probably fine by the majors.
Posted by: Mister Music Blogger | April 30, 2010 at 08:27 PM
On a related note, Constantin Films has been ordering the removal of all those "Hitler Finds Out About..." mashup videos since they own the copyright to the original movie (the Oscar nominated "Die Untergang" - "Downfall" to those of us who don't read German).
At OverthinkingIt.com, they have a nice essay pointing out that A) there's a long history of writers 'adapting' other people's works - Virgil, Shakespeare, The Bible - and B) thanks to these mashups, "Downfall" is the only one of its cohort of Oscar nominees that people are still watching (it's currently #487 - overall, not just in Foreign Language Movies That No One Saw In Theaters - on Amazon, and was released on Blu-ray last year) thanks in some measure to the mashups.
http://www.overthinkingit.com/2010/04/29/hitlers-xbox-copyright-mashup/
Posted by: Richard | May 01, 2010 at 07:01 PM