Why are musicians so keen to get played on the radio?
It can’t be because of the money.
In Australia they are paid at rates so low they come close to making streaming services look generous. By law, no radio station can be made to pay more than 1% of the station’s gross revenue for all of the music it plays, even if it is an all-music station. By the time the labels have had their cut, the artists get a lot less.
Legislation now before the Senate would remove the ceiling, allowing radio stations and the representatives of musical artists to negotiate freely, with a final decision made by a tribunal in cases where they can’t reach agreement.
It’s a bit like the legislation set up to arbitrate disputes between platforms such as Facebook and news organisations about the amount to pay for news.
The parallels tell us an awful lot about where the power lies in disputes between platforms and providers. Here’s a hint: it doesn’t lie with providers, whether they provide music, or news, or, for that matter, fruit to Coles and Woolworths.
Radio pays little for music, and always has
Here’s what happened with radio.
Legislation dating back to 1968 has given Australian radio stations a blanket right to play whatever music they want so long as they negotiate a payment rate with the relevant collecting society.
If the station and collecting society can’t agree on the rate, the decision is made by an independent tribunal, but, for commercial stations, the tribunal is limited to awarding no more than 1% of the station’s gross revenue, and for ABC stations, a mere half of one cent per Australian resident per year.
The attorney-general introduced the ceilings to “allay the fears” of radio stations and initially promised a review after five years, a provision he later dropped from the final draft of the legislation. A half a century of inflation has rendered the ABC’s ceiling of half a cent per person worth a fraction of what it was.
The ABC pays half a cent per person
The ceilings only apply to radio stations and only to the recordings. Television stations (including ABC stations) pay much more per track. And composers, who are paid separately with no legislated limit, get much more.
This means the composers of “You’re the Voice” get paid quite well, but the performer, John Farnham, does not.
The record industry has tried time and time again to remove the ceiling. In 2010 it even went to the High Court, arguing along the lines of the case depicted in the movie The Castle that the constitution prevented the Commonwealth from acquiring property other than “on just terms”.
The High Court said “no”, finding copyright wasn’t property.
Now, independent Senator David Pocock is trying again.
‘Fair pay for radio play’
Pocock’s Fair Pay for Radio Play Bill would remove the ceilings, allowing the radio industry and the record industry to negotiate “a fair rate” subject to adjudication by the Copyright Tribunal.
The radio industry says, if that happens, it will play less Australian music. It would also ask to be freed from the legislated requirement to play Australian music.
The recording industry talks as if the radio industry is bluffing.
Annabelle Herd, head of the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia, told the Senate hearing
even if the radio networks stopped playing all Australian music, they would still have to pay to play UK music, Canadian music and music from pretty much every other country in the world.
It’s a point she might not want to push too far.
In 1970 that’s exactly what happened. In response to what it felt was an over-large demand from the Phonographic Performance Company, the commercial radio industry said no and refused to play any of its music. Instead, it played records from independent Australian labels who didn’t charge and got their records pressed in Singapore, and American music, lots of it.
While the industry couldn’t play music from the UK, Canada and a bunch of other countries that were signatories to the relevant copyright treaty, it could play music from the United States, which didn’t charge and hadn’t signed the treaty.
When radio called the labels’ bluff
A disc jockey quoted at the time said he didn’t think the average listener would notice, and there’s nothing on record to suggest the average listener did.
The Beatles album Let it Be was released on May 8. The record ban, as it was called, came into force on May 16. “The Long and Winding Road” cracked the top five just about everywhere it was released, apart from Australia.
Five months later, the record companies caved. The only thing the radio industry offered it was a guaranteed number of advertisements per week. Which had been the radio industry’s point all along. The record companies needed ratio play for exposure. Without it, people were unlikely to buy their discs.
It’s possible to stretch parallels too far, but when Facebook temporarily stopped linking to pieces from Australian news sites in 2021, traffic to those sites slid 13%.
The common theme is that — as unfair as it seems — platforms have an awful lot of power over providers. If Coles and Woolworths say no, fruit growers won’t be able to distribute their product; if radio stations say no, artists won’t be as widely disseminated; and if Facebook and its ilk say no, news sites will get fewer clicks.
Facebook has been paying millions of dollars to Australian news sites since the news media bargaining code began in 2021. In February it said when the agreements expire, it will pay no more.
The code allows the government to force Facebook to pay, but only if it continues to link to news, and it has given every indication it won’t.
This article first appeared in The Conversation.
Peter ignores the critical fact that radio stations play an entire song – not a snippet with a link as done with almost any form of news aggregation process. He also does not acknowledge that the whole thing is just a racket using extortion tactics.
It’s interesting that Google has decided to play along for now. My conclusion is that they can’t believe their luck that the 4th Estate has created a racket for a big tech transnational to get protection from the media and the politicians! Simply priceless.
Google only shows snippets, but they are also very definitely in the market as indexers of “the whole internet”. They are common-carriers in that sense, and apart from adhering to site requests not to be indexed (robots files), everyone is in, and they’re not going to be making editorial decisions at that level. So they’re playing along with the bargaining code (which is weird, because news is probably the most heavily pay-walled category on the web, and they almost certainly can’t just index it in most cases).
As far as I understand (as a non-subscriber to Facebook), the situation is different in that whether a story is posted in full or just a snippet is entirely up to the user who posts that. The news organizations are all users who can post what they like, just like everyone else, and the algorithms just share those posts around. This “not doing news” approach is an editorial one, where they’re effectively banning a class of people and organizations from using their platform (posting to it), even when those people and organizations are not breaking any laws or terms of service. That seems like quite a break from the common-carrier status that protects them from responsibility for the content of those posts. It’s going to be interesting to see how it pans out, in that regard.
And how Facebook is only one part, for now, of the social media landscape ‘if Facebook and its ilk say no, news sites will get fewer clicks.’
Conversely, media may accidentally get stuck or embedded in the wrong social media channels, when they have already occupied print, radio, FTA tv, cable, some streaming etc.?
As opposed to breaking up the three large players in the RW MSM cartel?
A symbiotic relationship that the profit driven host would deny…. unlike that Split Enz wishful think, history does repeat.
Radio was an advertising outlet for artists – tickling the fancies of an audience that could be motivated to go and buy the manifestation of an artist’s intellectual creation, so that audience could listen to it whenever they liked.
The radio stations made their profits from their sponsors – paying the stations premiums to place their ads in popular listening slots where they’d be more likely heard (and products bought) as by-catch to the ‘entertainment’
[reminds me of that Benny Hill sketch years ago, complaining about the program interfering with the repetitive narrative run of ads, where the predictable actions of the characters in the ads becomes the ‘story’.]
The radio stations made their profits from sponsors buying air time, trying to sell their products to people attracted to those stations – to hear music they liked. But they didn’t want to pay those artists’ for their audience burley, attracting the audience.
[I remember well that radio boycotting of original (English?) recording artists back in ’68. What was subsequently served up was like cold porridge (with an overdose of Uncle Sam’s nuts?) and no sweetener. With ‘cover artists’ paid to pump out second class copies of the originals (Marmalade “Ob La Di, Ob La Da” toast anyone? …. Thought not.). The stations wouldn’t admit to the turn-off of audience : because that would interfere with sponsorship attraction.]
So it is with news – news the producers (with their dwindling sponsorship deals as audiences drift off) can’t attract glazed eyes or sell – they want to make up the short-fall through charging the ‘broadcast platforms’ of social media for ‘promoting’ it. But those platforms are making money without that news – they don’t need to pay for ‘bad news’ – punters can pick that up anywhere.
Can’t spot the connection here between music and Meta, whatever that is. But there’s been sod-all good music since the 60s, that’s for sure. I hear Dylan and the Stones are still on the road trying to make a quid.
The music is doing relatively fine. In fact there’s so much new music that finding “good stuff” (that you like) can be a bit of a chore, but there’s certainly plenty of it. Pity about the local performance circuit: lack of venues really is a problem. Also, as you say, punters aren’t limited to just what’s new and touring: the entire back-catalogue is readily accessible (which is why the new stuff has to be good).
Another example is academic authors and the scientific journal publishing industry – those who control the channels now control everything.