MEEP! Don Joyce <djATwebbnet.com> wrote:
>God knows how they divy up the gold
>they extract with only this hokum to go by, but you can bet it has only a
>passing relationship with what actually happened. And no one can prove it
>does or doesn't.
WOW! A statement that can't be proved or disproved... that's the *perfect*
foundation for a strong argument!
>On WHAT station is
>the Duke Ellington regailing our 40s soda shop being represented enough to
>even register?! The Duke's estate WILL NOT BE PAID A CENT of that $300
>bill! Instead, Brittany Spears will get it!
In all likelihood, you're right. Your '40s soda shop probably represents
less than 1-30,000th of the businesses paying the ASCAP levy (or whatever
you want to call it), and Ellington probably accounts for another
preposterously small fraction of the airplay that is being used as a
determining factor in parcelling out the dough. As you pointed out,
pinpoint specifics are *not* the strength of an industry-wide monitoring
tool/practice/whatever, especially when you start getting down into
micro-market-share participants (in terms of airtime) like, say, Stinky
Jake and the Happytones. Beyond the local or regional levels, though, when
a musician's work starts being heard by more than a couple of thousand of
people (at whatever point sales blips become apparent to top-down market
surveys), do you think that they should have to give up performance
residuals because somebody being heard by six people in a diner somewhere
is making a fraction of a cent under that same system? Is *every* musician
due a whole whack of cash simply by virtue of being heard by somebody other
than his/her roommate?
In theory, I agree with a lot of what Don is saying: this collection
system is a lousy way of rewarding anybody who hasn't captured the hearts
and wallets of an entire society, but consider the alternatives. Should all
of a radio station's ad revenue (that isn't spent on operating costs)
remain in the hands of the radio station? How else could per-performance
fees be monitored, if at all? Soundscan, after all, is a joke; it isn't
realistic to have an accountant with a notepad stationed in front of every
font of music on the planet; there aren't enough people (relative to the
size of the worldwide market for music) online to make any attempts at
monitoring download rates worth the effort (not to mention privacy
concerns, etc.).
As an aside, I'm sure that this is also a perfectly interesting discussion,
but is it really necessary to cross-post *only* the outraged tirades
against ASCAP Flack(tm) to rumori? Or *any* of this discussion, for that
matter, now that we know that it is taking place on pho?
As a further aside, I marvel at the amount of time that Don must spend
reading and typing during the day, and frankly, I'm sort of jealous.
-me
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