Christopher Bingham 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (25) comment rss

  • On the post: BMI Appeals Ruling That Lets Venues Route Around BMI, Claiming It Somehow Harms Musicians

    Christopher Bingham ( profile ), 27 Aug, 2010 @ 10:33am

    Maybe artists sign with DMX...

    ...because they'll actually get paid. Unless things have changed a whole lot since I was interested in affiliating with any of the PROs, the whole scam is based on exptrapolating plays based on a small sample ofmajor market commercial airplay. Which means if I get a few plays in Tacoma Lady Gaga gets my nickel. When you multiply that by 12,000 stations it starts to add up.

    But wait, how will this "non-profit" make it's "administrative" costs if it can't shake down restaurants? hmmmm

  • On the post: Is Free Parking Costing Us Billions?

    Christopher Bingham ( profile ), 18 Aug, 2010 @ 10:34am

    Re: Less RIAA...

    That's the heart of the problem. We have to decide that a few years of empty but entirely dependable busses and trains / subways will be worth the investment, before we can really get people out of their cars.

    Here in Seattle, which has a pretty decent system, it can still take you two to three hours to get from one part of town to another by bus, compared to a 15 minute trip by car, if you want to get there at 7pm on a Saturday night.

    If you want to commute to downtown and back at rush hour, no problem. The rest of the time a couple of hills over and it's a nightmare.

    The no free parking people want to penalize car users before we have solutions to moving people from one place to another. All it does is breed resentment for people that are trapped by the infrastructure. Until public transportation approximates the functionality of single vehicles, we're not going to get people out their cars.

  • On the post: Payola Scandals Show Why Performance Rights Tax Makes No Sense

    Christopher Bingham ( profile ), 11 Aug, 2010 @ 10:29am

    Re: Re:

    Without payola, the DJs at the stations would play what they think is good, or what their audience are *actually* demanding - which can also be new music if it's good enough (and to be honest probably will be).

    The DJs don't make those decisions. The Music Director and the Program Director decide. So the MDs might do that and sometimes actually do. The only place DJs have any say is on specialty programs which usually happen on the Sunday morning folk ghetto.

    New music is added on Tuesdays and commercial stations add three new tunes a week. If they get serious response, and the records are selling, they end up in rotation. The labels pay to get them on the air and keep them there long enough to gauge the response, but that's about all they can do. The radio stations ride the line between the "comfort food" (wonderful metaphor!) of proved hits and enough new stuff to keep the playlist relevant.

    All of this is happening in the context of mass market surveys. You get a call from a radio marketer and he plays you six seconds of a song. You rate it 1-5 and they throw out the ones and the fives, knowing that if people really like a tune, a significant proportion of the audience will also hate it. Programming for mediocrity.

    The entire purpose of the music on radio stations is to get you to listen through the advertisements.

  • On the post: ASCAP Claiming That Creative Commons Must Be Stopped; Apparently They Don't Actually Believe In Artist Freedom

    Christopher Bingham ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2010 @ 02:47pm

    As in Europe

    One of the reasons that ASCAP and other PROs are bad for the vast majority of composers is that they fight that kind of record keeping - the actual logging of actual songs performed - so they can funnel the collections to their major market composers.

    They've been doing this kind of logging of plays at clubs in Europe all along. The people who actually write the songs are the people who get paid - not just the special designees of the major labels.

    The PROs create more problems for upcoming artists by shaking down small venues.

  • On the post: ABA Journal Highlights How The Music Industry Is Thriving And How Copyright Might Not Be That Important

    Christopher Bingham ( profile ), 07 Jun, 2010 @ 04:55pm

    File sharing isn't theft

    "The idea goes like this: Impose a blanket license on copyright owners, making it legal for all their musical works to be shared online. In return, ISP customers would pay a monthly licensing fee. Music rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI would collect the licensing fees and distribute royalty payments to performers and songwriters."

    Sorry, but that is simply a scam to funnel money to record labels again. Their payment models and collection methods more closely resemble extortion for mom and pop coffeehouses than anything equitable. Again they want to base the payment scheme on extrapolating the number of song plays from small samples - and they get to choose the sample pool.

    The bottom line is that sharing is not stealing. If I make a copy of your shovel I am not stealing your shovel - I'm creating another bit of chattel. If I build a few more shovels, based on your design, and sell them, I might be infringing on your market. If I give them away and say "keep it if you like it" the person has the choice to keep it or pass it on - which *might* have cost you a sale or it might not have.

    We've moved into a different business model of how music is heard and sold. In the old days, the only music that made it out to the market was controlled by a handful of gatekeepers - and they made the money. Now I can record a tune in my office and it can available to the entire world in minutes. It would be grossly unfair to anyone who creates to use the law to support the gatekeepers again instead of the creators.

    You can try to force people to buy every copy of your music, but good luck getting heard. File sharing is the new radio play. I'm selling more now than I ever did in the old days.