The old model is fine, songwriters get paid when their compositions are played on the radio.

Performers get paid when they sell tickets and tour.

Now the performers want the songwriters’ shares? no.

CDM has got yet another discussion going about the proposed bill to pay performing musicians for radio play (currently only composers are supposed to get paid for radio plays.)
That discussion is focused on what’s “fair” between the…

It doesn’t surprise me that Jay-Z is in favor of this idea… this is more money for him that he doesn’t have to share with the co-writers of the track. Then you have the issue of who the “performer” is in sampled music… if someone samples a James Brown record, do the performers in that sample receive performance royalties? How are these performance royalties split?

I’m guessing this would be negotiated just as the co-writing credit is negotiated as far as how to split revenues from writing. Yet, this is another huge headache that gets in the way of making music and releasing it. I can see sampled artists who have heavy weight demanding all of the performance royalty, and getting it. Likewise in a band like the current “Smashing Pumpkins”, Billy Corgan is going to take the vast majority of the performance royalty.

Don’t think that this means that everyone in the band is going to get an equal share. It’s not going to work that way. Kurt Cobain split his writing equally with the other members of Nirvana until the songs started making money, then he had everything rewritten so that he got 80-90%. Performance royalties would work exactly the same way.

I have to agree with the notion that performers getting paid should be something negotiated on the front end. It keeps things much less messy. There are already R&B stations in Atlanta who spend +80% of the time talking and less than 20% of the time playing music. Doubtless this would further skew towards talk if this were implemented. It just makes more financial sense for the corporations. It should be obvious by now that artistic motivations are largely not being regarded by these radio stations anymore.

As for artists who don’t get paid for performing cover songs on the radio… well, they knew this when they recorded the song!

Station groups are not going to pay additional royalties just to broadcast music when they can buy syndicated talk shows for less money–and bonus points for an excuse to trim what is left of the local programming staff.