Spanning the State: "It Won't Be Long, Me See Me Love"

A long-standing war between the music industry and the broadcasting industry may have its final battlefield here in Oregon. Sort of: Jack Ely, the singer whose 1963 version of "Louie Louie" still makes the rounds on oldies radio, lives with his wife in a mobile home on a horse ranch in Oregon. Ely says they share $30,000 a year from her teacher's pension and his Social Security checks. They are paying down a mortgage. So sometimes it bothers Ely, 65, when he hears his voice singing "Louie Louie" on the radio or in sports arenas, knowing he's not getting paid. "It gets played twice a day by every oldies radio station everywhere in the world. And I get nothing," said Ely, who recorded the song with the Kingsmen before getting drafted by the U.S. Army and leaving the band. "I got one check for $5,000. That's all I ever saw from the sale of 'Louie Louie.' " Since the advent of radio in the 1920s, songwriters have made a little money every time their tunes are played on stations in most industrialized countries. The six children of "Louie Louie" songwriter Richard Berry today share more than $100,000 in royalties every year. But performers like Ely don't get a dime. Songwriters get their cut through ASCAP/BMI. But performers don't, meaning that Jack Ely doesn't make a dime, no matter how many toga parties dance to his classic performance. Radio stations, through their lobbyists in the National Association of Broadcasters, have managed to drive back every legislative and regulatory attempt to change the situation. And with the recording industry taking a beating these days--CD sales are down, and digital online sales aren't coming close to making up the difference--performers the recording industry are especially motivated to get a piece of the ad revenue their songs create for the stations. [T]he music industry thinks it can win. In the last two decades, recording companies have secured royalties from other formats: Internet radio, satellite radio and music channels on cable TV services. Mitch Bainwol, the chairman of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, says he's prepared for a "multiyear" fight. The bill has the support of the Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), and is set for final revisions this month before possibly being sent to the House floor for debate. And it's the radio stations--who, to be fair, are also having a tough time of it these days--who are the holdouts: The recording labels have already made inroads. In the late 1990s, they won the right to collect royalties for performers when songs are played on satellite, Internet and cable radio. A body called SoundExchange collected $151 million for performers from those formats in 2008. Meanwhile, there's a more fundamental reason why this cobbled-together arrangement of labels and stations--with the performers themselves floating out on the edge somewhere--is a poor state of affairs, and Jack Ely himself recently gave his take on it, with a radical solution: In the early '60's when I was recording, records were thought of as a tool to help promote live performances. The live performances were the main revenue stream and the records were just promotional tools to get people to come see the shows. Somewhere this mode of thinking got turned upside down. Consequently in years hence, record companies, producers, et. all, have made recordings, hoping to profit from the sale of those recordings alone, regardless of whether or not the artist could ever pull it off live. [...] The suggestions that recordings are produced today just to sell recorded music is all backwards and the sooner the record companies and producers and artists figure this out the sooner they will all quit sniveling over the fact that the entire world is freely sharing their music digitally and isn't willing to stop; and in fact will do anything to circumvent their efforts to get paid for the recordings alone. The days of producers and musicians putting bands together just to get a recording deal so they can get paid by the record company for a product that usually never even gets released; those days are over. [...] The solution is to give the world all the free music it wants, but to give the recording entity, whether it be a record company or a producer, or whomever, a cut of every live performance. That will do at least two things and maybe more that I haven't even thought about yet. First it will give everyone involved in the recordings a source of revenue (pay day) for all their hard work of producing and promoting the recordings. Second, it will weed out all the so-called "recording artists" who couldn't, in a live venue, perform their way out of a paper bag.