This is the final installment of a 3-part Q & A with Scott Southard, director of the International Music Network (booking agency) about the state of the field, ideas for new directions, and specific practices in increasing demand for global music, in advance of "Entrepreneurial Approaches to Global Music: An Open Forum" on January 9, 3-5 pm, at the Arts Presenters conference. Read Part 1 or Part 2. With the driving profit model of music shifting so drastically, what can be done to change the very terms of the marketplace for music?
One of the greatest challenges to keeping the marketplace strong is what’s going on in terms of artists receiving composer royalties from use of music on the Internet. I’m not talking about pirating music. The resource of using music on user-generated sites should be supported but there needs to be a business model that compensates the musician for use of the music. That is particularly critical to the world music community where rights registration in Third World countries is not a priority for governments there. But it should be for the First World user of that product.
The FCC recently considered the royalty rates for Internet use of music, which is still a fraction of what traditional broadcasters would pay. The difficulty because the Internet can’t be policed by national boundaries whereas the control over broadcasting distribution can. There needs to be an international convention established providing for composers rights. This applies to software distribution and literary publishing as well; all intellectual rights. The use of intellectual property on the Internet needs to have international treaties that will adequately compensate the author for their work.
There was a proposal back in the ’80s, when cassette tapes were first developed that a tax on the use of the tape was automatically collected to compensate artists through a general fund controlled by, I suppose, a trade organization. Something similar has to be done with the Internet. It would mean that part of your monthly subscription for an Internet service provider would be a tax. And then there needs to be a system that tags intellectual property so that the use of an individual composer’s music can be tabulated and a formula for distribution of the royalty tax can be fairly distributed.
When we met at WOMEX in Sevilla, I was complaining about everyone spending so much time on public policy, on immigration. They’re so focused on process. Certainly the immigration process is unfair, unwieldy, and too complex. But we need to spend a similar amount of effort on a far bigger issue that would compensate artists for their output. It would also create the revenue stream to not only supporting the generation of new music but also new programming models. So that art centers when asking to broadcast, as the Metropolitan Opera is now doing, would reach an international audience, a global audience on the Internet. Removing one of the barriers to that distribution model is making a funding system so that the composer’s rights are compensated for those broadcasts.
The overriding theme is: destroy the industry as we know it. Tear it down. Because we have to get rid of inefficient practices and misdirected investments on the basis of the 1980s business model that everyone built from. There is a completely new model in front of us. The longer we delay taking the risks and making those investments in building the new model the smaller and smaller the market will get. It’s going on right now as we each try to grab more market share out of a smaller and smaller market.
That may work for the large organizations or the very small individual organizations, the single person operations, who don’t have anything to lose, and can live very efficiently in their entry into the market. But what we really want to be doing is expanding the market so more of the smaller and midsize organizations that currently exist can continue to survive.
It’s an unfortunate fact that in the world music market that IMN is one of the big organizations. We’re only 14 people. We’re a very small organization. In our market, the larger organizations will survive due to opportunities of scale and political standing). It’s the small and midsize that will suffer the most. I want to support market development because a broader marketplace gives us give us a lot more diversity and potential for future growth. And most of us come to this industry not for the financial benefits, but for the personal rewards. And the most important thing is that a diverse healthy successful industry will provide us all with greater personal rewards as well.
Professionals in the global music field are ensouraged to continue this discussion at "Entrepreneurial Approaches to Global Music: An Open Forum" on January 9, 3-5 pm, at the Arts Presenters conference.
DubMC.comis the brainchild of Dmitri Vietze and is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., global music publicity firm.
