(Long Island, NY) A lot of the inspiration I get for writing this column comes from telephone conversations I have with my friends and colleagues. In fact, sometimes I think I should be paying THEM for half the material I come up with.
I was telling a musician friend this very thing when she brought up the idea of paying royalties to my inspirational friends.” It’s her contention that if a band has to pay royalties to songwriters for releasing cover versions of their famous songs, a writer should do the same thing in their own writer way.
Personally, I think my friend was just trying to make a couple of extra bucks, and I told her so. She cried “starving artist,” and tried to get me to take pity on her. I promised to buy a couple copies of the new record to give to people I know in the club circuit round the home-front instead. She smiled and thanked me for helping her eat once or twice that week.
I’m pretty sure she was pulling my leg. Ok, I HOPE she was pulling my leg.
My friend is half of the San Antonio electro-pop duo Hyper-bubble. This is a band that has been hitting the tour circuit pretty hard in the last couple of years and getting lots of attention latley for a new CD called “Airbrushed Alibis,” released at www.FilthyLittleAngels.com. The whole conversation about the royalty thing led us to a
conversation about how the Hyper-bubble album was recorded and the band’s struggle with one song in particular that didn’t make it onto the finished record because of, guess what, royalty payment problems.
Turns out that every time a band plays a song written by somebody else, say you want to do a cover version of “Purple Rain” by Prince, you have to pay nine cents PER REPRODUCTION of the song. That means that if you press ten thousand copies of your album, you have to do some math.
In the end, Hyper-bubble decided that nine cents a pop was too complicated and they left the song off the record. I asked her if she’d consider posting the mystery track on the band’s myspace site (myspace.com/hyperbubble) so that I might be able to hear it some day as a “free listen”.
And that, friends, is when the conversation got serious. “Free listens” is a bit of a sore spot for bands and web-based radio people alike. My musician friend reminded me about the “save net radio” campaign aimed at trying to stop a dramatic increase in royalty rates for internet broadcasters. According to an article posted at TheNation.com, “Royalty rates for web casters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!).”
For musicians such as my friend in Hyper-bubble, this is a major blow–believe it or not–against what they do. It sounds like a sweet deal for an independent band. After all, the idea that bands might get more royalty money from internet radio play is pretty appealing. But, as the article at TheNation.com states, “If the increased rates remain unchanged, the majority of web casters will be bankrupt and immediately forced silent.”
That, friends, means LESS money for independent bands because their means of spreading the word about the music has been chopped off at the knees. No radio play means far fewer listeners going to iTunes and downloading the album or ordering from the band’s website.
A bill called the Internet Radio Equality Act was introduced in both the House and Senate by what some are calling an “unlikely duo” of Senators Ron Wyden from Oregon, and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas. This bill is said to, should it become law, put internet radio on par with satellite radio and undo a $500 per channel royalty fee. It could keep the net radio people from packing up for good, and it would keep my band friends from losing a major source of hype for good music.
With issues like this, I can understand why my musician friend would want to hit me up for “inspiration royalties”. If the Internet Radio Equality Act does not pass, her job becomes 100 times more difficult. I have no idea which way this thing could go, but I certainly hope that a fair and equitable decision can be reached to allow internet broadcasters to survive. They don’t broadcast in a vacuum, after all. The bands rely on them to help spread the word. The radio stations rely on the bands for great new material. If the Internet Radio Equity Act doesn’t pass, it could even affect me.
After all, I won’t be able to gossip with my musician friends without wondering if I’m going to feel guilty for NOT paying an “inspiration fee”. At the very least, I’m going to be purchasing a few extra downloads from my friends in Hyper-bubble.
The only thing I can really say at this stage is, yes, SAVE NET RADIO. And if you want to help out, why not drop a line to Senator You-Know-Who and mention that I said so. Find out more at http://www.savenetradio.org
