First album I ever got was the first Monkees album when I was in 4th grade.

I’ve still got mine somewhere, I think it was first grade.

Thanks Jane.

On air radio has always been the BEST form of FREE advertising for the music industry, where an artist’s music gets exposed to the most people.
So of course, the only logical thing to do is to try & stifle it by demanding that radio stations pay even more money per song. Excellent plan, Smithers, EXXXCELLENT!
R.I.A.A. – musics best friend.

Proves once again that artists, musicians, writers, are no better than the rest of the “ordinary” downtrodden citizens. Money to the powerful. Depleted white bread that lacks any value to the rest of us.

RIAA broke through on performance royalties with online radio last year, so this levels the playing field, so to speak.

Except they never made any provision that the money go to the performers. All the biggies lobbying for this — Billy Corgan, Don Henley — will be able to exact a pound of flesh in their own contracts, but other performers (particularly older ones not currently recording, with no clout & nothing in their contracts) apparently won’t see a thing.

Nice work, Congress.

Still have mine but nothing to play it on.

I wonder if anyone asked John Hall about this. Do we know how he voted?

I guess I was in 8th grade when my sister got her copy. Was watching a Tragically Hip concert video over the weekend. They’re named after something in a Michael Nesmith video project, called, Elephant Parts.

Fascinating post. I take it this is JH’s area of expertise.

I don’t know as much as Howie Klein does, but yes, intellectual property law and royalty licensing was a focus of my graduate program.

I had a vague recollection of that factoid, but for some reason more in terms of practice than school.

James Burke noted in his Day the Universe Changed series that bits of the past live on when deemed acceptable even under changed circumstances — such things, in this day and age of ever more rapid change, as royalties, e.g.

Ion Audio makes a turntable with a USB port. I bought one last year for around $80 and it’s worked out well. You can listen to your old vinyl albums while converting them to digital.

I still have four of the old Monkees albums on vinyl. I’m afraid my plastic model Monkeemobile, however, is lost to the ages.

Jane – I had understood that actors who performed in old TV shows made after a certain date were paid residual royalties when they were re-run on TV years later ad infinitum. So, is it true that Gilligan and Jethro get payment for their memorable work years later, and Mickey doesn’t, and if so, why is this the case? Do the actors have a better union agreement than the musicians in this respect?

USB turntable. Kewl!

Am I the only one old enough to remember payola, the multiple scandals where record companies paid the radio stations to broadcast their content? Now the radio stations have to do the reverse? I’d call this irony, but the term isn’t pejorative enough.

We need to add rolling back spurious “intellectual property claims” to the list of Democratic priorities. These are abusive monopolies that masquerade as copyright and patent law while allowing the least creative portions of our society–the coprorations–to profit at the expense of the creative intellects that the laws were supposed to protect.

Congress should repeal the Millenium Copyright Act. It should legislate judicial creations like corporate copyright and work-for-hire doctrine out of existence. Only creative individuals should be able to hold a copyright or a patent. Congress should make invalidation of copyrights and patents the automatic punishment for abusing the limited monopolies that the law grants. Abuses would include unreasonably high pricing, artificially limited distribution, and any and all attempts to limit fair use by side agreements, such as licenses. Congress should reduce the length of time that both patents and copyrights run. For copyright, it should be no more than 20 years (yes, I am a professional writer if you were wondering). Congress should explicitly exclude performances and athletic events form copyright, since neither arises to the level of substantive originality required by copyright. Finally, if we really want to protect creative activity as the Constitution intended, we should legally limit transfers of rights, so that the songwriter never loses his rights to the record company. Publishers should only have the rights for as long as they are paying royalties, and royalties should be renegotiated periodically at fair intervals.

I remember back in the ’70s the English rockers I knew got checks from the radio stations that played their music.

There was little enough money from the record companies and it helped keep the musicians off the dole.

Why am I not surprised that when the U.S. finally gets around to radio royalties it’s only the record companies that see the money?

The way I see it, the internet is the perfect place to just ignore the greedheads that have distorted the music business for the last at least 250 years.

So how do artists get paid? We simply must create a patron culture. If you enjoy the work of an artist, tip what you can afford. And if this means you pay $10,000 for a CD because you really want an artist to succeed, it should be EASY to make the $9,980 into a charitable contribution.

Yes, this is technological pass the hat, but I’ll wager the artists come out ahead. After all, all the artists that are making a living in the religion biz are already using this form of economics.

Of course, to make this work, there needs to be some cultural cops who hector the free-loaders like they do for fund-raising at PBS.