Noting that Ohio’s US Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) is a co-sponsor of the Performance Rights Act, the Cleveland Plain Dealer posted a look at the topic on its website. The newspaper spoke with Congressional testifier Sam Moore and the NAB.
According to the article, Moore, the surviving headliner from Sam and Dave, has one tune played over 5.6K times annually and another just under 3.4K times. The article next notes that Mr. Moore contributed to radio’s ability to sell advertising, the proceeds of which Mr. Moore would like to share in. It does not speculate on what percentage of radio’s gross was attributable to Mr. Moore.
On the other side of the fence, NAB’s Dennis Wharton said, “The best friend of record labels and recording artists has traditionally been radio, because that’s a three-minute commercial for a song,” and pointed out that radio provides 239M listeners a week, providing enormous free promotional value for musicians.
For those who are regular readers of this space, the article broke little or no new ground on the ongoing issue.
RBR-TVBR observation: We’ve been covering this topic for a long time now, and many of our readers have weighed in on it as well. If some way, somehow RIAA is able to slam PRA through Congress, maybe there would be a handful of stations willing to cough up the cash and pay recording studio prices. But we’d bet a lot of stations could do very well convincing thousands of musicians – both unrecognized veterans and up-and-coming young talents – to opt out of royalties in exchange for free airplay. We’d bet it won’t be long before sales from the opt-out group eclipse those of the studios.
