A new way for the music biz to shoot itself in the foot

“We want money for :30 second sample music clips people listen to on iTunes and Amazon.”

I know what you’re thinking: “that damn RIAA is at it again.” This time, though, it isn’t the RIAA; it’s the “good guys” (that being a very relative term; they’re really just the “much less evil, but still Monty Burns-ish” entity in usual music biz kerfuffle), namely ASCAP and BMI. Those two entities are publishers rights groups. They’re the ones who collect songwriting royalties, but are not entitled to the actual recording revenues. (If you buy a CD, the biggest chunk of cash goes to the record company that manufactured the CD and to the owners of the recording itself, ownership that is usually split between record label and artist based on each artist’s individual contract; until an artist is established and making zillions of dollars, usually the label owns the actual recording, for instance. A smaller portion of what you pay goes to ASCAP or BMI and gets distributed to the actual individual songwriter. ASCAP and BMI also make sure that clubs that do live music pay a licensing fee so that songwriters get paid, and also enforce licensing for Muzak beds in restaurants, supermarkets, etc. etc.; basically their job is to ensure that people making money with someone else’s song pay a little money for that privilege.)

Not sure exactly what is going on here, because this seems on the surface like the NCAA deciding they don’t want people wearing Ohio State Buckeye sweatshirts or Notre Dame baseball caps. What I think might be going on is that ASCAP and BMI are using this legal action to tacitly accuse iTunes and Amazon et al. of colluding with the RIAA to be less-than-accurate about reporting actual downloads of music (and thus entitling the publishers to less money to be paid). In other words, this may be a tug of war between the publishers and the record companies–two big, retarded giants–with consumers and artists getting the honor of being the rope.