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Business News Week In Five
The music business week in five – 8 Jun 2012
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 8 June 2012
Hello everyone. Yes, here we go, the end of a very short week indeed. But, a busy week for music business news nonetheless, with lots of copyright debating going on. Talking of which, the First Monday guys have a very interesting event taking place on Monday where Ian Hargreaves and Richard Hooper, the men behind the government’s latest review of copyright law, will be in conversation. There should be some very interesting insights – so see you there! Book here.
01: Clear Channel Radio and Big Machine announced a landmark deal. The arrangement will see the US broadcaster pay the country music label a revenue-share royalty in return for using the music firm’s recordings on its AM and FM radio stations. Under US copyright law, broadcasters are not obligated to pay the owners of sound recordings – ie labels – a royalty when they use their music. Big Machine negotiated the deal by offering more favourable royalty rates for internet streaming, where a royalty is due under the US system. Clear Channel is investing heavily in its internet services just now. Elsewhere, the issue of radio royalties in America was being discussed in Washington, where the RIAA said the labels should be paid by radio stations, Pandora argued it was unfair it had to pay and its AM/FM rivals did not, and a rep for the US radio industry said the labels should shut up and be happy for all the free promotion radio gives them. Big Machine deal | Congress debate
02: RIAA called on Google to do more to combat piracy. The US trade body’s chief Cary Sherman was giving evidence to a Congressional hearing on ‘The Future Of Audio’, and said that while he recognised Google was working to help combat piracy in some ways, it could do a lot more, especially in reducing the number of links from its search results that point to unlicensed content. Sherman would really like Google to stop linking to any URL hosted by a known copyright infringer, such as The Pirate Bay, rather than content owners having to alert the web firm to every specific offending web address. Google is likely to object to that proposal, though The Pirate Bay said that it didn’t care one way or another, reckoning that if Google stopped linked to it, more people could come direct to the Bay itself. CMU report | C-Net report
03: VW and Beach House both commented on the copy cat song debacle. The car firm claimed that it never set out to directly copy the Baltimore indie twosome’s song ‘Take Care’ for the soundtrack to its recent advert, instead wanting to celebrate and represent the ‘dream pop’ genre in general. Yet the ad track is so very, very similar to ‘Take Care’, and the band’s manager has confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that VW’s ad agency contacted them on multiple occasions to try to licence that song before commissioning its own. CMU report | Wall Street Journal report
04: The MPAA said it didn’t object to lost MegaUpload data being returned. The US movie industry trade body was responding to a call by the Electronic Frontier Foundation last week that demanded the American courts do something to reconnect former MegaUpload customers with the files they were cut off from when the controversial file-transfer service was shut down by the authorities in January. The MPAA said it supported a return of legitimate files to former MegaUpload customers, but only if any copyright infringing content was removed from the digital firm’s former servers first. Which is probably an unrealistic demand that could stop any effort to return legitimate data to former MegaUpload users. CMU report | Register report
05: The UK government’s communications green paper was axed. The Department Of Media, Culture And Sport said that it would hold a number of seminars to discuss reforming the Communications Act, rather than putting initial proposals in writing as originally planned. The seminars should kick off next month. The communications law review will look at broadcasting and internet regulations, including the obligations – or not – on internet service providers to police piracy. CMU report | Guardian report
And that is your lot. Though look out for another CMU podcast over the weekend.
Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU
