Copyright Law

Songwriter on P2P: ?Artists Can Play Live Shows, We Can?t?

By soulxtc

Says touring artists can support illegal file-sharing because they’re still able to earn a living, but notes that composers can’t and therefore suffer disproportionately.

Björn Kristian Ulvaeus, a Swedish musician, composer, and former member of the Swedish musical group ABBA, has found a new voice as a prominent critic of illegal file-sharing.

His main argument is that unlike performing artists who can tour and ostensibly sell other merchandise to shore up flagging album sales, composers and songwriters like himself cannot.  A broad coalition of UK music artists recently came out and denounced plans for a “three-strikes” plan to disconnect file-sharers in the UK.

Ulvaues readily admits that he’s an odd spokesperson for “poor songwriters” being that he’s financially secure, but he says their plight is just as important in the P2P debate because they can’t exactly “go on tour and sing for their supper.”

He writes in the Times Online :

it is truly a wonderful thing to know that something one has written is listened to by many people; waking emotions, causing goose bumps, and drawing that irresistible urge to listen again. Maybe a song you wrote could help a poor, depressed person out there to forget his misery for a while.

All this is, of course, reward in itself, but a prerequisite for the existence of these songs is almost always that their author can afford to devote himself entirely to cultivating his talent.

It raises a good point because I’ll be the first to admit that songwriters really have been lost in the shuffle of compensation in the music industry. It’s easy to say screw the record labels and let artists finally reach their fans directly and so too most of the profits.

However, what happens to the people who wrote the songs the band sings? Perhaps its up to them to pay a percentage of their earnings to the very people who gave them the material in the first place.

Ulvause closes by hoping for the “design a modern copyright environment that works with the internet without demanding surveillance that eats away at integrity.”

Unfortunately, this will never happen. What would a “modern copyright environment” look like? Short of DPI there’s no way to monitor data shared amongst individuals.

Also, consider the fact the UK music industry’s own economist concluded revenue was up some 4.7% since 2007! The reason? diversification. Things like more complex business to business revenues (from collective and direct licensing, advertising, sponsorship).

I sympathize with Ulvause, or at least those songwriters not nearly as well off as he, for he’s right. They live on royalties. But, you can’t fight the march towards a digital music world. They’ll need to get creative and look at taking greater shares of licensing revenues currently demanded by the RIAA from every club, bar, cafe, gym, satellite radio, waiting room, office cubicle, and anywhere else where their music makes a so-called “public performance.”

Maybe the problem isn’t so much a file-sharing problem as it is a revenue sharing problem. Have songwriters dared to ask where all those performance royalties are going and if they’re really getting a fair share?

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on September 15, 2009 (boomark / email).