Today’s post is by FMC intern Peter Haugen, who has a penetrating mind for all manner of speculative musical phenomenon!

It’s Friday! Can’t think of a better time to speculate on the future of… you guessed it.

While flying cars and jetpacks have yet to become a practical reality (but let’s not give up hope!), a recent YouTube video serves as a reminder that, musically speaking, the future is closer than we think. If you haven’t seen this video yet, try listening to the first two minutes with your eyes closed.

OK, from an sonic standpoint there is nothing particularly revolutionary about it: a piano with some violin accompaniment. Then you open your eyes to see there is no one sitting behind the piano! Duped! Of course, player pianos date back to the late 19th century, but no one would ever confuse a piano roll with actual playing by Rachmaninoff. That is, until Zenph Sound Innovations came along and found a technological way to mimic the performance dynamics of this late maestro.

You gotta wonder far can this technology be taken. read more

Intro by Michael Bracy, Policy Director, Future of Music Coalition

Image credit: Nancy Palmieri

Those who have followed FMC’s work over the past decade know that we’ve been strong supporters of establishing a public performance right for terrestrial radio. Why? Because compensating performing artists directly for the use of their work is simply the right thing to do. (Check out our Public Performance Right fact sheet to learn more.)

On March 3, I spent a couple of hours on Capitol Hill with one of our favorite artists, the wonderful and talented Erin McKeown. As luck had it, we were able to attend a news conference hosted by the MusicFIRST Coalition that featured Dionne Warwick and top leaders from the civil rights community, all of whom endorsed legislation for a public performance right.

We thought it would be great if Erin could weigh in on how she views the issue as a working musician. Take it away, Erin! read more

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve heard a lot of chatter about “breaking” new musical acts. The current bone of contention: can a truly DIY artist sell more than 10,000 albums?

The debate kicked off in mid January when Tom Silverman — founder and president of the legendary hip hop label Tommy Boy Records — was featured in a series of articles on musiccoaching.com. During the first interview, Tom referenced 2009 data from SoundScan, the company that tracks retail purchases of music, which indicated that only 112 records reached platinum status in 2009 (that’s 1 million albums). He then focused on the other end of the sales spectrum, pointing to the dearth of artists that have broken the 10,000 sales barrier without label help. Tom said:

In 2008 there were 1,500 releases that sold over 10,000 album units. Out of that there were only 227 of them that were artists that had broken 10,000 for the first time. So in the whole year only 227 of the artists were artists that had broken what we call the “obscurity line.” When you sell 10,000 albums, you’re no longer an obscure artist; people know about you. […] We looked at the 227 and identified that only 14 of them were artists doing it on their own and all the rest were on majors and indies; a little more than half were on indies.

One company that measures such stats says definitely.

While it may not seem like much of a surprise that web radio plays more artists than traditional broadcasters, new data supplied by streamSerf — a company that monitors and reports on music played on terrestrial and web radio — highlights a pretty big disparity. According to the company, last month American broadcast radio stations played 25,399 unique artists (this includes public radio stations) while Internet radio stations played 829,971 unique artists. We’re no mathematicians, but apparently that’s 32 times as much.

While FMC has not independently verified these figures, they do seem in keeping with our recent studies of the commercial broadcasting space. In April 2009, we released a major report called “Same Old Song,” which examined whether commercial radio playlists had changed at all as a result of the 2005-2007 payola investigations, after which the Federal Communications Commission and the nation’s four largest radio station group owners – Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Citadel and Entercom – signed voluntary agreements meant to curb payola and open the airwaves to more local and independent artists. read more

Today, (Oct 15, 2009), the Senate Judiciary Committee passed their version of the Performance Rights Act of 2009 in voice vote. This is an important step in ensuring that performers and sound copyright owners (usually the labels) are compensated when their music is played (or “performed”) on over-the-air radio.

Currently, when you hear a song on over-the-air broadcast radio in the US, the composer/songwriter/publisher are compensated for that “public performance” via ASCAP/BMI/SESAC, but the performer and record label are not. Meaning, if you hear Aretha Franklin’s classic version of “Respect” on the radio, the songwriter (in this case, Otis Redding’s estate) and the publisher receive payment; the Queen of Soul (and her label) do not receive any performance royalties. Nearly every other industrialized nation compensates songwriters and performers for the over-air broadcast of their work — notable exceptions include Iran and North Korea. read more

Yesterday, we told you a little bit about FMC’s fight for artists’ free speech and right to creative expression via a legal brief on the FCC’s indecency policy. Well, we’re at it again — this time in the form of FCC reply comments to a MusicFIRST petition originally filed with the Commission back in August. read more