Vince Gill discouraged by the state of the music business

I don't normally post theses type of articles, however. Vince Gill has always been one of the most respected and honest artist in the industry, and one of my favorites. Reading this article reminds me of a world war 2 german  sniper hiding in the bushes waiting to pick off another soldier. Record labels, remember who won the war! The good guys!!!!!!!!!!


Vince Gill Discouraged by 'Mind-Numbing' Country Music

• Posted May 15th 2012 1:50PM by Gayle Thompson
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Vince Gill spent 30 years as an artist on a major label, the last 23 at MCA Records, before heparted ways with his record label earlier this year. The 55-year-old music icon acknowledges that the shift in his career has been difficult to accept.

"I still want to have hit records," he tells Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette. "You never get that out of your system. But in some sense, I have been shown the door."

Vince hopes to still churn out more albums, but not necessarily what is commercial today. "For me, [country music] lost its traditional bent pretty severely," explains the tunesmith. "I would love to hear someone write a song like 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' rather than 'You're hot. I'm hot. We're in a truck.' It's just mind-numbing to me."

Vince admits he is dismayed by the current state of the music industry, and worried about its future. "Income streams are dwindling. Record sales aren't what they used to be," he notes. "The devaluation of music and what it's now deemed to be worth is laughable to me. My single costs 99 cents. That's what a [single] cost in 1960. On my phone, I can get an app for 99 cents that makes fart noises -- the same price as the thing I create and speak to the world with. Some would say the fart app is more important. It's an awkward time. Creative brains are being sorely mistreated."

Now that Vince doesn't have to meet a record label's requirements, he is free to work on whatever he wants, which for him includes an upcoming album with his western swing band, the Time Jumpers. "I'm from Oklahoma," he notes. "That stuff is like drinkin' water to me."

The singer-songwriter is also spending time on the road this summer, first on a 12-citybluegrass tour (backed by band members of the late Earl Scruggs), followed by several shows performing three decades of his own hits. Vince says fans should expect the unexpected.

"Night to night it varies," he explains. "I always try to do a little bit of everything. Some gigs you get to play for only 75 minutes, or an hour and a half. Some you get to play for three hours. I'm always trying to make it interesting. What I try to do is serve the song. I really feel like the gift of being a great musician is playing what's appropriate -- and with the right guitar and the right sound, the right everything. That's most important to me. Serving the song the best way possible. Let everybody shine, everybody play -- makes it fun."

See Vince's concert schedule here.

Song writing royalties in the future

There was a comment made from a past blog asking, What are song-writing royalties going to look like

 in the future? With all the changes,  lack of clarity, and unstable atmosphere  in the music industry at present

there is no way at this time to answer that with any certainty. So bare with us over the next little while

as we dive into this very complicated topic. Hopefully, we will be able to provide some clarity real soon.

In the mean time digest the article below. That should keep you busy for a while!

Songwriter Royalties and Digital Retailers

If you’ve ever looked at who gets paid (and how) in the digital music space, you may have walked away dizzy. The two copyrights in music — sound recording and composition — wend their way through the marketplace in lots of curious ways. For us, the most important thing is how money gets back to the actual muscians and songwriters.

As convoluted as things can be in the US, the picture is even more complicated in other countries. This post at the TuneCore blog looks at the rights that digital download stores need to acquire in order to pay the people that are supposed to get paid when a piece of music is sold. (There’s also a separate but related post about a recent incident with TuneCore and Amazon EU/UK, in which the latter company pulled TuneCore artists’ tracks due to an unresolved royalty issue.)

The TuneCore/Amazon situation is still being sorted out, but there may be some early takeaways. Of the millions of artists who use TuneCore to get their music into digital stores, a healthy percentage are also the songwriters. And it’s probably a good bet that not all of these songwriters have publishers or are even members of Performing Rights Organizations (PROs). In fact, 99 percent of the world’s songwriters do not have “publishing deals” (by default, they are the publisher but can do little to enforce their rights in certain environments).

This isn’t to suggest such institutions aren’t worth belonging to, but rather that there are now a great many creators who exist outside the traditional music industry structures. They should, however, have the same rights as other artists when their music is purchased.

For US songwriters and US digital music retailers, there is a degree of predictability to the marketplace. When these same songwriters and tunes are sold on digital platforms overseas, things can get weird — especially if nobody’s paying close attention. TuneCore honcho Jeff Price explains:

When a song sells in the United States, a digital music service like Amazon pays the songwriter money to the record label and then the record label pays the songwriter.

When a song sells outside of the United States, a digital music store must get the licenses and pay the person or entity directly that controls the songwriter rights. The digital music service does not pay the money to the record label to pay the songwriter.

OK, that seems pretty straightforward, right? A digital service simply pays the money to whatever entity owns the songwriting copyright. Not so fast. The hiccup comes from the fact that there are TWO rights that a digital music retailer needs to acquire to sell a songwriter’s music overseas: the right to reproductionand the right to public performance.

In the US, the reproduction right (aka the mechanical royalty) is paid by the labels to the publisher through the Harry Fox Agency (the publisher typically has a split worked out with the songwriter, or the songwriter is the publisher). There is no public performance royalty owed for digital downloads in America; here, that right only exists for broadcasting (over-the-air or online).

This means that many US songwriters who sell music in digital services outside the US may not have a way to collect all the money they’re owed. And even if you belong to a PRO like ASCAP, SESAC or BMI, you aren’t covered for the reproduction royalty. Confused? Here’s Jeff again:

If an artist is affiliated with a performing rights organization in the US like ASCAP or BMI, it is only for the right of Public Performance, not for Reproduction, which is just one of the two needed songwriter licenses.

The digital music service still needs to obtain the second license (the right of Reproduction), and make payments to the person or entity that controls that right for the songwriter….

…Some digital music services might try to get the licenses and make payments to a local, third party that does not represent all the rights (or any of the rights) of the songwriter.

These local collection agencies hold onto the songwriter’s money, take over 20 percent of it, and give the rest of it away to others companies like Warner Bros., Universal, EMI, Sony and others based on what percentage of the “market” they control.

The reason we bring all of this up is because it stands to reason that there will be more and more artists coming into the marketplace who use services like TuneCore, CD Baby or ReverbNation to get their music on global digital retail platforms. This means that there is the increasing need to make sure the money owed to these creators gets to them, even if they aren’t members of a foreign royalty society (or a domestic one, for that matter).

We think it’s great that Jeff from TuneCore is going to bat for the artists who use his service. But what about non-TuneCore artists? We’d love to see even more open dialogue on this subject, as the internet has made music a truly global phenomenon. Getting things to run smoothly for creators will require cooperation from a lot of parties, old-school and new-school.

The compensation picture for artists is likely to remain pretty complicated — as initial findings from ourArtist Revenue Streams project attest — but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to make it less so.

Submitted by Casey on February 1, 2012 - 6:22pm

Tags: 

• Digital Distribution
 
• Artist Compensation
 
• Mechanical Royalties
 
• Performance Royalties

Royalty Changes

Record Industry Braces for Artists’ Battles Over Song Rights

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: August 15, 2011

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Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those artists — and thousands more — now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving the labels out in the cold.

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Frank Stefanko/Sony Music Entertainment via HBO

Bruce Springsteen in an image from an HBO documentary on the making of 'Darkness on the Edge of Town.'

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• ArtsBeat Blog: Don Henley Urges Artists to Know Their Rights(August 16, 2011)

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When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted “termination rights,” which allow them to regain control of their work after 35 years, so long as they apply at least two years in advance. Recordings from 1978 are the first to fall under the purview of the law, but in a matter of months, hits from 1979, like “The Long Run” by the Eagles and “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, will be in the same situation — and then, as the calendar advances, every other master recording once it reaches the 35-year mark.

The provision also permits songwriters to reclaim ownership of qualifying songs. Bob Dylan has already filed to regain some of his compositions, as have other rock, pop and country performers like Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, Loretta Lynn, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits and Charlie Daniels, according to records on file at the United States Copyright Office.

“In terms of all those big acts you name, the recording industry has made a gazillion dollars on those masters, more than the artists have,” said Don Henley, a founder both of the Eagles and the Recording Artists Coalition, which seeks to protect performers’ legal rights. “So there’s an issue of parity here, of fairness. This is a bone of contention, and it’s going to get more contentious in the next couple of years.”

With the recording industry already reeling from plummeting sales, termination rights claims could be another serious financial blow. Sales plunged to about $6.3 billion from $14.6 billion over the decade ending in 2009, in large part because of unauthorized downloading of music on the Internet, especially of new releases, which has left record labels disproportionately dependent on sales of older recordings in their catalogs.

“This is a life-threatening change for them, the legal equivalent of Internet technology,” said Kenneth J. Abdo, a lawyer who leads a termination rights working group for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and has filed claims for some of his clients, who include Kool and the Gang. As a result the four major record companies — Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner — have made it clear that they will not relinquish recordings they consider their property without a fight.

“We believe the termination right doesn’t apply to most sound recordings,” said Steven Marks, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, a lobbying group in Washington that represents the interests of record labels. As the record companies see it, the master recordings belong to them in perpetuity, rather than to the artists who wrote and recorded the songs, because, the labels argue, the records are “works for hire,” compilations created not by independent performers but by musicians who are, in essence, their employees.