Conferences

FOM: Business School of Rock

The second panel at the Future of Music Policy Summit was the Business School of Rock panel. I won't go into the details of the panel here -- please check the previous link for the online blog. I just want to illustrate one point that Shoshana Samole Zisk made.

Shoshana talked about working with George Clinton Enterprises and how George Clinton is a great musician, but not such a good bookkeeper. George Clinton doesn't really have a complete list of all the work he had done, figuring that his record labels would take care of the bookkeeping end of things. Well, it turns out that the labels are not so good at it either, or they are intentionally slow in making payments to their artists. Shooshana talked a fair a bit about the trials of getting the record lables to fork over the cash that is due to the artists.

At one point she asked the label about the royalties for Atomic Dog the label said that: "Atomic Dog has not recouped."

I think that recouped is my newly most hated word, displacing shareholder value. This means that the label claims that Atomic Dog had not earned enough money for the label to recoup their costs for creating and promoting Atomic Dog. Shoshana was quick to point out that just in the last year Atomic Dog was used in two movies in the last year and was certain to have recouped by now. After much back and forth she finally managed to get the label for fork over some cash.

This story is really sad and disheartening, but it appears that this is not an isolated incident, but common practice in the music industry. Turns out that just today a $50M settlement was reached to get the labels for fork over more of this cash:

Spitzer announced a settlement in which the nation's five largest recording companies promised to do a better job of tracking down and paying $50 million in unclaimed royalties to thousands of performers. The beneficiaries include country singer Dolly Parton, rock stars David Bowie and Dave Matthews, conductor Zubin Mehta and thousands of lesser-known musicians.

I find it ridiculous that the labels can claim that they cannot track down Dolly Parton or David Bowie. Absurd! I'm angry -- very angry. Thank you Shooshana for enlightening me -- and thanks to the FOM for the great panel.

Posted by Mayhem at May 5, 2004 02:02 PM