The RIAA

entanglement

Member
Jan 30, 2006
4,297
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France
ISurfTooMuch said:
"With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"

Source: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/29/0335224&from=rss

What do you think? Is such authoritative penetration doing any good to the online music/radio scene?
 
I am going to form an organization to lay claim to royalties from all royalties claimed by organizations claiming royalties for unsigned artists. Let's see how far we can stretch the absurdity.