[Rumori] Songwriters Say Piracy Eats Into Their Pay

[Carrie McLaren]

January 5, 2004

Songwriters Say Piracy Eats Into Their Pay
By DAVID BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/business/media/05song.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
hey think of themselves as the unsung victims of Internet music piracy.

Much of the publicity in the battle over illicit Internet music 
downloading has gone to artists and record labels. But songwriters 
say they are also being hurt financially.

Unless they are also performers, most songwriters are typically 
neither rich nor famous, and their names may be known only to those 
who bother to read album credits or liner notes.

But their incomes can depend on royalties from sales of recorded 
singles and albums. In fact, songwriters' earnings are more directly 
tied to album sales than those of recording artists, who can 
potentially earn substantial sums through live concerts and 
merchandise sales.

Charles Strouse, a composer best known for his Tony-winning musicals 
"Bye Bye Birdie" and "Annie," says illegal downloading has had a 
disastrous impact on his profession, not to mention his income.

"I am hurting," said Mr. Strouse, who is 75. Even though his songs 
are not as widely sought as hits by popular rock or pop stars like 
Sheryl Crow and Eminem, he felt the effects of downloading after the 
hip-hop artist Jay-Z drew on Mr. Strouse's "It's the Hard Knock Life" 
from "Annie" for the 1998 album, "Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life."

According to BigChampagne, an online media measurement company, 
Jay-Z's version of "Hard Knock Life" was downloaded 1.16 million 
times from July 2000 (when the company began tracking Internet use) 
to May 2003. The total is probably much higher, said Eric Garland, 
BigChampagne's chief executive, because the entire lifespan of the 
song was not counted.

Although songwriters typically earn only pennies for every sale of a 
recorded song, if every person who downloaded "Hard Knock Life" had 
bought a CD instead, Mr. Strouse would have collected at least 
$46,000 in royalty payments, assuming he would have received 4 cents 
a download.

Mr. Strouse took in about $250,000 from recording royalties in 2002, 
according to his publisher, Helene Blue. Last year, she said, Mr. 
Strouse drew only about half that total, mainly because of illegal 
downloading of various recordings containing his songs.

"I've gotten fat off this business," Mr. Strouse said. "But obviously 
I'm very annoyed. It's awfully hard to write music. Ownership should 
be guarded very carefully."

Writers can receive as much as 8.5 cents for each song that appears 
on an album, each time a copy of that album is sold.

In practice, however, many songwriters receive less, since royalties 
are typically split with their publishers, leaving them with 4 cents. 
If a song is co-written, that 4 cents is split again, so the total 
can amount to just 2 cents. Songwriters also receive royalties of 
varying amounts when a song is played on the radio, or is used in 
movies or television.

"Eight cents is nothing; it's cheap," said Carey Ramos, a lawyer for 
the National Music Publishers' Association, which represents music 
publishers and their songwriters.

But "a penny here, a penny there - they add up,'' he said. "In the 
aggregate, it's a big difference in the paycheck of a songwriter."

Barton Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters 
Association International, an industry group, estimates that because 
of the difficulties in making a living from the craft, there are only 
half as many working songwriters today as a decade ago.

Nowhere have songwriters suffered as much as in Nashville, the 
nation's songwriting capital. The town is teeming with record 
companies, recording studios and publishing houses, most of which are 
concentrated in a small area along Music Row, a half-mile stretch 
along 16th and 17th Avenues, near Vanderbilt University. The city is 
also home to some 4,000 songwriters, Mr. Herbison said.

"I know people that have had No. 1 songs who are working at the 
Dillard's makeup counter," Mr. Herbison said. "Not that there's 
anything wrong with that - it's an honorable occupation - but that's 
not what they intended to do."

Illegal downloading "doesn't just affect Garth Brooks," he added. "It 
affects songwriters, it affects every studio in Nashville that's 
closing, it affects the working musicians. What it ultimately affects 
is the choice of music the public gets. When I have No. 1 songwriters 
working other jobs, we're not getting more music."

David Ross, publisher of "Music Row," a Nashville music industry 
publication, said music publishing companies had sharply reduced the 
number of songwriters because of plunging revenues from Internet 
downloading and industry consolidations.

Jason Blume, 47, is one of 15 staff writers who lost his job at the 
publishing house Zomba Music Group after BMG Music acquired it in 
2002. Mr. Blume had been a staff writer at Zomba since 1991, most of 
that in Nashville, and his credits included hit songs recorded by the 
likes of Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and Collin Raye.

Now, as Mr. Blume searches for another staff writing job, he said, 
the sense of despair in Nashville is so prevalent that when people 
walk down Music Row, "they say they feel like they're on the Titanic."

According to Mr. Ramos of the publishers' group, since the first 
popular file-sharing service, Napster, emerged in 1999, annual 
collections of royalties from recording sales (known as mechanical 
royalties) have fallen 22 percent, to $455 million.

In the four years before 1999, he said, those royalty collections 
grew 24 percent. Assuming that the pre-Napster growth rate would have 
continued, and if illegal downloading had not occurred, Mr. Ramos 
said, songwriters would have collected an estimated $300 million more 
in payments since 1999.

Shelly Peiken, 46, a songwriter in Los Angeles who co-wrote Christina 
Aguilera's "What a Girl Wants" estimates that she has lost nearly 
$200,000 in royalties because of online piracy. Still, she considers 
herself one of the luckier ones.

"Some of my friends are at the ends of their rope," she said. "I'm 
not going to make myself sick over it. But if I hadn't had these 
hits, I'd probably be pretty strung out right now."

Not everyone is convinced that downloading is the devastating problem 
that the music industry makes it out to be.

"There are a lot of pieces that go into the industry's problems that 
we're not hearing about," said Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer for the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group. 
"It's easy and convenient to blame it all on piracy."

Ms. Seltzer cited the sluggish economy and consolidation among record 
labels and radio companies as other reasons that record sales had 
fallen sharply over the last four years. She argued that, assuming 
the downloading is authorized, online music distribution actually 
lowered costs and increased exposure for songwriters and artists.

Songwriters "will have to learn how to adapt to the new technology,'' 
Ms. Seltzer said. "The buggy manufacturer doesn't have a place in the 
world of automobiles."

She suggested that the music publishing industry adapt for the 
recording business a model similar to one used in radio, where 
broadcasters pay blanket fees for rights to play songs and the money 
is split among the songwriters.

Whether or not online piracy is the main reason for declining music 
sales, songwriters are trying harder to make their voices heard in 
the debate. The Nashville songwriters' association has made more than 
20 trips to Washington this year to lobby lawmakers over music 
piracy, Mr. Herbison said.

In September, Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee 
Republican, formed the Congressional Songwriters Caucus to help 
address illegal downloading. About 40 members in the House have 
joined the caucus.

Songwriters and publishers have also sought new sources of income to 
compensate for the losses caused by piracy.

Ms. Blue, who has been in the music business 35 years, says one of 
the most lucrative sources of new revenue has been royalties from 
cellphone ring tones. Last year, cellphone users bought more than 4.8 
million ring tones, according to IDC, a technology research firm.

But with two billion unauthorized downloads of songs every month, 
according to the Recording Industry Association of America, royalty 
fees produced from ring tones cannot make up for the toll that piracy 
has taken on songwriters.

"There's a big dark cloud over the business right now," the 
songwriter Ms. Peiken said.


-- 
Carrie McLaren
Editor, Stay Free!
www.stayfreemagazine.org
www.illegal-art.org
718.398.9324