Richard Flohil wrote:
>
> Two other notes on the above. Erica wrote to tell me that rates for
> performing right organizations are set in the US by the LIbrary of Congress
> (which I didn't know) - but presumably after submissions from both the
> societies and the music users. And Jon wrote me offline to suggest the
> chances of ever having a single society in the US (as every other territory
> does) are about the same as a snowball freezing in hell; he's probably
> right, but if songwriters really understood hopw they are getting screwed,
> they'd raise hell!
Richard, ole buddy, I have considered this (difference in the amounts
paid to US writers here vs what foriegn writers get) long and hard over
the years and I have come to the conclusion that this is a matter of
scale. If the writers in Europe got what we get here, they'd all starve
to death, even the biggest ones, and yes they would be raising hell.
However, if the writers in the US got what writers in Europe got it
would be extraordinarily generous when you added up everything from a
country this big.
I think this makes perfect sense. Think about it: if you are a French
writer, for instance, a gold record is 100,000 copies sold (as it is in
many other countries around the world, as opposed to 500,000 in the US)
and this makes you a tidy amount of money in France. However, if you
awarded that same amount of money in the US, writers here would be
richer than the Sultan of Brunei. It is impossible. How many radio
stations are there in France? In the US? There is no way they can pay
the same amount of money to the writers. What this really means is that
at some point the governments of smaller nations who controlled royalty
payments were persuaded that keeping artists decently paid was a
necessity. Here it pays equally well if you have a hit song, but because
there are so many stations it was not possible (until now, let us pray)
to pay every single writer for every single spin, so a survey system was
developed. This leaves out marginal writers like me who never get any
money even though I get my songs played, but it makes hit songwriters wealthy.
jg
--
Joe Gracey
President-For-Life, Jackalope Records
http://www.kimmierhodes.com
