BLOGGERS TO PAY LICENSE FEE?
May 01, 2010,
Written by The 405
IMRO (Irish Music Rights Organisation) have started demanding that music bloggers pay a 'limited online exploitation license' for any promotional material that is sent to them by artists, labels and promoters. This includes all websites that are available to view in Ireland, so international sites will also be affected, including Pitchfork and Stereogum.
There have been a lot of protests against this new license, particularly from those whose interests IMRO are supposed to support, as two acts pulled out of their showcase event at the Dublin Academy. This was in protest of their record label, Richter Collective, one of Ireland's finest labels, also being told to pay the license fee for streaming their music on their own website.
Here's what the highly respected Irish blogger, Nialler9, www.nialler9.com, had to say:
"My biggest gripe with this license is that it’s a blanket fee that doesn’t take into account the size of a blog or site really. Sure, it has three price bands but lumping a music blogger who blogs from home in his spare time in with a professional company is wrong. It will have a reductive and destructive effect on the promotion of music online as many bloggers won’t be able to afford these fees and as a result bands will have less of an outlet to promote their music.Is the license fee paid worth more than the promotion of bands and hence, gig attendance, record sales etc? IS this what the bands want? Do bands want bloggers to pay license fees to promote their songs – do speak up. After all, IMRO is speaking on your behalf already and they have decided to apply this license to music sites and blogs without any negotiation or dialogue apart from here’s a license, pay it. IMRO will negotiate with Youtube, concert promoters such as POD concerts so is there room here for negotiation?"
Niamh Burke Neff, label manager of Bedroom Community, also had a point to make on the issue:
"Surely the resources they would put into that would be better allocated to devising a better way of collecting and paying the artists their broadcast royalties from more traditional (and commercial) media (something that every artist I know already complains about, and not just with the Irish collection society but also their EU colleagues)."
If you want to find more reactions to this misguided, downright ridiculous decision that IMRO has made, you can join the 'Save The Irish Music Blogs From IMRO!' Facebook group here
And if you feel that this is all irrelevant to you just because you're not based in Ireland, then have a think about the ideas that this might give IMRO's UK and US equivalents, PRS (Performing Rights Society) and ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) if this goes unchallenged.
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14 responses so far...
Oliver
This is ridiculous. Wake up IMRO and get a grip.
danny
Absolutely fucking laughable! Laughable and scary!
Janice
There should be more better resolution.
Will
They've properly shot themselves in the foot here. They're logic's just fucked off for good.
braincandy
Oh dear... Not sure they've thought that one through. A lot of bloggers promote the band they love, because they love them and want to share that love. I don't know that many bloggers that do it for money and I certainly don't know any bloggers who make enough via their blogs to be able to pay license fees. It's a shame. Fact is, this is free publicity from thousands of people around the world that they are just throwing away. It's a very, very bad idea and it's the music that'll suffer.
TheMariageOfaDeadDogSing
The Irish music industry is in a really, really strange place right now that doesn't translate very well to a British context. Imagine, if you will, a country of only 5 million people. Its Capital city, Dublin, is only the same size as Bristol, and it's second largest city is comparable in size to Cardiff.
Whereas the UK has multiple specialist music magazines that run weekly (like NME or Kerrrang!) Ireland has 1, Hotpress. Which not only prints fortnightly, but has also taken on the unenviable task of covering every single style of music that comes out of the country, as well as interviews with big foreign bands that pass through and even certain culture elements.
We also don't have anything like 6music, specifically designed to showcase upcoming bands. Dublin has Phantom FM, but outside of that we have one nationally broadcast radio show dedicated to underground Irish music, which goes out around midnight for 2 hours once a week.
So imagine you only had Q magazine and Zane Lowe to tell you about all the new music going on in your country. As you can imagine, a lot gets left out.
Thing is, there are HUNDREDS of bands doing the rounds in Ireland at the moment. The past 5 years we've had a massive explosion in pretty much every style, and have finally broken free of bands being labeled "The Next U2". The best bit is that a lot of them are really, REALLY good!
The problem is that we simply don't have a music infrastructure that can handle all of this, and so it's fallen on the blogs to take up the slack.
It's not like the 405, who are just a drop in the ocean compared to something with the clout of NME or 6Music. If you guys give away a song for free, it's no biggie. That's what, 200 people who will download it, tops?
But in Ireland, 200 people is a massive amount. That's the difference between playing at your local pub and sharing the stage with artists like Xiu Xiu, Saul Williams, Los Campesinos!, Jens Lekman or The Microphones. Seriously, I've seen all those acts play in a 250 standing venue, AND THOSE WERE BIG GIGS!
Now imagine the entire countries eyes are focused on this handful of blogs. They have literally single handedly made the careers of bands like Fight Like Apes, So Cow and Patrick Kelleher. It wouldn't be entirely unfair to suggest that by failing (or more accurately, refusing) to cover certain bands they played a major part in Queen Kong deciding to split and you're Only Massive to decamp to Berlin.
IMRO have, pretty fairly actually, realised that getting your song mentioned on a blog like Nialler9 is pretty much the same (if not better) than getting your song on the radio. So on the one hand, you have (relatively) massive blogs, giving away songs for free, that literally dictate how the countries musical landscape will look, but on the other, ordinary people like you and I running them from their bedrooms.
This is a plan that would only really work in a small country with limited resources like Ireland though. The British music industry is large, and sophisticated, enough to absorb blogs like this giving away tiny little bands music for free. The 405 isn't really going to make or break anybody any time soon.
Will
Great. The small blogs are causing trouble, so dump a fee on them that'll stop them operating. Sounds perfectly fair.
Oliver
What you talking about? We've been making/breaking bands for years now ;)
Yeah, I understand your point but essentially all they're dong is killing any chance of a striving music scene.
Funnily enough our viewer base is large and certainly enough to make a nice sum of money. Do I feel bad about that ? Definitely not. The amount of money I receive, or could receive, is nothing in comparison to the amount a pr company would charge for a campaign. Would they be forced to pay to promote music? Definitely not. Yet a blog might have to? That's ludicrous, no matter how big a country is.
PS. 500+ download actually ;)
This Reality Podcast
Small point: The PRS already has a LOEL, they've been pushing it for a couple of years.
Hopefully, all the unfavourable fallout from the DEB debacle will have discouraged the PRS from trying to pull the same stunt in the UK.
We get bands, their management, PR companies and record labels asking us to play their work (outside of the PRS structure), because it's free advertising. How much would it cost them to mount a campaign that is guaranteed to put their work in front of an audience of 152,000 listeners?
Common sense, sooner or later, will break through.
Oliver
exactly
fokkawolfe
This is awful, but..
I guess it would only apply to monetised blogs but even if it didn't then I imagine this would be hard to not only enforce but to prosecute over, on a personal freedom of speech stance you could argue that this law would be wrong. Ireland is signed up to EU human rights treaty isnt it?
A blog is not the same as a magazine where I can see that this might need to apply! +what makes a music blog a music blog, plenty of small record labels have blogs, so do bands, so do kids where the law might not apply.
This feels like it should also apply to say, fashion blogs making money off of showing catwalk pics etc but it wont. so will this law effect them if they post stuff about a pop star or musician?
Like many internet laws coming in around the globe it will take a few well aimed and logical court cases to put things right, only a matter of time before that happens.
The giant record labels cant drag things back to pre internet days however much they want to. As bloggers we have a lot of passive power, all we have to do is not write about those artist and musicians signed to the big labels. Just stop today, dont buy their stuff, dont write about them and dont work for them.
The Marriage Of A Dead Dog SING!
500+, really? Wow ... in that case, remind me to send you some of my stuff sometime :)
The thing that you have to remind yourself is that IMRO is not "The Music Industry" in the same way that Labels are. It is, theoretically, a neutral body set with the sole task of collecting royalties that musicians and songwriters are owed. In short, it is their job to make sure artists get paid.
The problem is mostly that people don't understand how complicated (or deep) Copyright Law is. For example: if you're sitting at your desk in an office, playing a cd that customers can hear, that constitutes a public broadcast and you are legally required to pay royalties to the artist. You can actually be fined quite heavily if you don't have a broadcasting license. This might seem a little harsh - your local dentists office isn't going to destroy the system by itself - but when you factor in every waiting room in the world, shit adds up. Or, even more realistically, when you consider how many people pass through your local Supermarket, surely that's comparable to the "listener total" of a radio station.
However, most copyright law isn't realistically enforceable. It's only when people start Taking The Piss (sadly, not a real legal term) that they bring out the heavies.
Though technically illegal, no one would consider making your girlfriend a mixtape worth chasing up. On the other hand, making 1,000 copies of that mixtape and selling it most certainly crosses the line into full on Taking The Piss territory. Blogs have gotten away with it up until now by sort of skirting the borders of Taking The Piss. They (can) have quite a solid fanbase, but they make no money from it. Therefore, though numerically Taking The Piss, they're not financially Taking The Piss.
But just let me put that into perspective here. If The 405 featured one of my tracks on a mixtape, that would bump up my last.fm listens by a factor of around 500%. Though I benefit from having a MASSIVE surge of interest in my music, I have still not made a single penny from it. As a musician of COURSE I'm happy about the fact that hundreds of people are enjoying my music. But the knowledge that I have made 500 people a little bit happy doesn't really offset the general misery of not being able to make my rent this month.
Oliver
I totally get where you're coming from and I totally respect your viewpoint. I know someone that works in Copyright and as someone that has studied music at University and has worked in the industry I know the difficult situation.
The unfortunate thing though is that the wrong people are getting villified. A lot of music based blogs give away music they they're not allowed to. Should they be charged or shut down. Yeah of course. At the end of the day they're not killing anyone but they're certainly breaking the law.
Now take us for example. We only ever post music that we've been given by lables or pr people. Should we charged for handing that out to our fanbase? Of course not. The situation is that we're cheap advertising. In most cases, for most blogs, it's FREE advertising.
I'm not bothered how difficult the system is, charging someone for something they're ALLOWED to give away for free is wrong. I doubt even the musicians involved would want those blogs charged.
It just seems unfortunate to me that this has happened.
Will
It's just gotten ridiculous as well, what with Richter Collective being charged for streaming their OWN artists' music on their OWN website. This is bureaucracy at its worst and IMRO should review it at the very least, because although their purpose is to protect the rights of musicians, they're actually upsetting those very people.
danny - 02/09/10
That's a cool interview with some genuine sounding dudes. The quotes attributed to them at the top are genius! [view article]
danny - 01/09/10
This is so good, you need to stream this shit. My review of it will be up soon..! [view article]
elaine - 01/09/10
I ask for a round two against the pills! I liked how the pill ladies are on screen during the bridge portion of the song. I guess nothing can stop us music lovers from hearing music. :) [view article]
elaine - 01/09/10
Thanks for sharing! I really like the use of the tom toms and the harmonics on the guitar. Nice touches. It adds more dimension when appropriate. [view article]
wil - 01/09/10
frickin love this band! [view article]