Thoughts?

Is the sky falling?

Speaking of a "Performance tax".

Did you hear they want to put a tax on pornography??

Did you hear they want to put a tax on pornography??

Why not. They tax beer and cigarettes.

My hope, although I know it never would, is to tax it out of existence.

Actually though, I'd be happy if they taxed it enough that the porno shop by Vancouver Mall went out of business!

Just like the guberment to be a day late and a trillion dollars short...

What good is a porn tax when you can see all the porn free on the whirled wide web?

obviously referring to a different type of performance...

So no one has anything to say on this?

on Porn?

Here is my take on porn. Think of all the lonely guys, who can't get a date and have never been with a woman before.
What would they do without their "spank" magazine?

Please see the Muzak string. This is a no BS serious deal.

Thanks Hwidsten.

There was an interesting piece on NPR this morning... the topic was Dizzy Gillespie and that "Take the A train" came out on this date in 1940.

The part relating to this thread is that in 1940 ASCAP and Radio Broadcasters were in a feud over royalties.

None of Gillespies catalog could therefore be played on radio since it was all ASCAP licensed.

His answer was to make an entire new catalog from scratch which was NOT ASCAP... thus playable on the radio.

A very interesting solution! Could we see the day that radio drops much of the music they currently rely on if it were to become taxed (performance royalties) at twice the current rate?

Would or could anyone in radio or the music business step up with such a solution in todays environment?

not so coincidentally BMI opened its doors in 1940

We're already seeing something like that. Lately some groups have been marketing their music themselves in cooperation with Wal-Mart, and over the internet. As you suggest, BMI, "Broadcast Music Incorporated" was formed by broadcasters because of the ASCAP Royalties flap.

For many years ASCAP and BMI took a percentage of a station's gross billing as their fee. A few years ago the broadcasters negotiated an "Industry Royalty" for the business each year, and each station has been paying their percentage of that number based on a formula. That number is being renegotiated this year.

The "performance tax" being debated is different in that it covers the artists who perform the music rather than the composers and publishers of the music who are paid by ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.

Radio has always had an exemption from that fee because in the original deal put in place back in the 1920s, the record companies accepted the responsibility of paying the artists based on record sales.

Now that is up for grabs because the record companies want to make up for profits lost when they lost control of their libraries when Napster and other peer to peer digital duplication was created.

The record companies would have you believe they want the fees for the artists. If that were true, why do more than 50% of the proposed fees go to the record companies?

Broadcasters believe the "performance fees" are a rip off. It will be settled in the Congress, and that's why we need as many people as possible to weigh in with their Congressmen and Senators to stop them. The percentage of revenue the record companies want....over and above what is already being paid to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC is just plain frightening, especially to smaller stations.

So, help your industry and yourself. Contact your Congressman and ask him to support HCR 49, the bill in the House that will stop the performance fees.

On another note, today the NAB and Sound Exchange, the organization set up to negotiate and collect fees on behalf of the artists, have made a deal that will hopefully bring a lot of stations back to streaming full time on the internet.

Ever since the Courts ruled in favor of Sound Exchange's rate structure a few years ago, most music stations stopped streaming because due to the goofy regulations it was impossible to know what a station's streaming costs would be month to month.

The rules stated that a station had to report how many people were listening to a song each time that song was played by a station on the interent. The same song could not be played more than once every 4 hours. And, there were more rules that I won't get into here due to lack of space.

There were two major problems with those rules. One was that there was no existing software that could report in real time how many people were listening to your station each time you played a particular song. And, the way the fees were set up, it was impossible to budget for a monthly cost because it could change dramatically.

On our little station, for example, our fees could be $300 one month and $ 3,000 the next month.

But today, Broadcasters and Sound Exchange have come to an agreement on fees, and I expect a lot of us to be back on the internet full time in as soon as a few days.

That is a great accomplishment and those broadcasters involved in the negotiations have done a tremendous job and deserve great respect, considering effectively they started with both hands tied behind their backs due to the previous adverse court rulings.

In a related story from The Casper Star-Tribune:

Radio Station Owner Faces More Suits

http://www.trib.com/articles/2009/02/21/news/casper/116dd9fbb80e0660872575640004 3895.txt