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Radio Should Pay Musicians
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Published: November 2, 2007
Singer Sam Moore, the tenor voice of the '60s hit singing duo Sam & Dave, told a sad, instructive story to Congress this summer, but lawmakers have been slow to respond.
He pointed out an injustice caused by a quirk in the nation's copyright law. Singers and musicians get no pay when their songs are played on commercial radio. When you hear Moore sing "Soul Man" on the radio, he doesn't get a dime.
Radio stations consider the promotion of the song payment enough. But as Moore pointed out, most performers sell very few CDs these days, and when they grow too old to tour, they have no income.
Oldies stations still play the Mary Wells recording of the chart-topping "My Guy," yet when Wells became too sick to tour, she had nothing.
"I remember Mary Wells coming to my house after she was diagnosed with cancer," Moore testified. "Mary brought so many great songs to life ... And yet, she told my wife and me that she didn't know what would happen to her little girl Sugar after she died.
"In 1992, with no income earned from decades of radio airplay, Mary died without being able to provide for her daughter. Sugar spent several of her younger years sleeping on a pallet in the kitchen of her older sister's one-bedroom apartment shared with the sister's husband and young children."
Singers and musicians, seeing dwindling CD sales, are asking for a small royalty each time one of their performances is played. They want a formula similar to the one used for songwriters. Under existing law, satellite radio and Internet stations pay per performance, but ground-based stations do not.
Most foreign countries pay their own performers, but they won't pay ours because we don't pay theirs.
U.S. radio stations argue that the promotional value of airplay is all singers need. They call the proposed royalty a new tax. It's not a tax. It's an old concept called paying the piper.
Performers ask only for a small cut of the profits commercial radio makes by broadcasting their work. The formula could be written to avoid hardships for small religious and community stations.
Moore is right. The artists who "created the recordings that are the soundtracks of our lives" deserve to be paid.
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