You‘ve got to feel a teency bit sorry for the record companies. It was a great business to be in until things started to go sour in the 1960’s with the proliferation of low cost cassette players. The internet almost put the final nail in their coffin as many who wouldn’t dream of stealing from a shop, saw no wrong in downloading the latest song from Napster. Few other manufacturers could have their products so easily cloned. Where once a record contract with one of the majors was virtually the only way for an artist to get a hit song, now any act with minimal equipment and recording software can by-pass the system and reach millions through UTube.
Yet it’s difficult to sympathise with their plight when they have done so little to adapt to change. While the record companies were trying to sue 12 year olds for ripping tunes, it took a computer company, Apple, with some real vision to do for them what they should have done for themselves and set up the elegant download interface everyone knows as iTunes. And right now the radio industry through initiatives such as triple j’s Unearthed, Austereo’s RADAR, dmg’s I Am With the Band and the commercial industry’s New Artists 2 Radio, is introducing more new music than ever.

So it comes as little surprise that The Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA), that represents both recording artists and record labels, has chosen to try to increase it’s revenue by hitting up the Radio Industry for an increase in the already hefty fees it pays for the rights to broadcast songs. Click here to read our earlier story.

Rather than find innovative ways of partnering with Radio to do thing such as exploit the latest technology which would allow listeners instant purchase of any song that took their fancy as they heard it being broadcast, the PPCA has taken, presumably, what they see to be the line of least resistance.

If that’s the case, then the Record Industry will encounter plenty of resistance from the Radio Industry.

What say you? Is the PPCA biting the hand that feeds it? Should stations pay more, less or are the current fees just right?

As usual, you are under no obligation to stick to this topic. You may use this forum to express any view you like, provided it has something to do with radio and provides no grounds for litigation.

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