Phat Phreddy,
To read more, start at the
http://www.riaa.com and check their links. U.S. Copyright office also has info. It is a rat's nest.
There are several categories of rights:
1. The songwriter's (or publisher's) rights. The person who owns the song gets paid when it gets reproduced. They often assign these rights to the Harry Fox Agency or to a publisher. Many record labels also have publishing entities.
2. The recording. If I record "White Christmas", I own the recording. I still have to pay the publisher who owns the rights to the original composition. I can assign my recording rights to a record label.
Then you need to separate whether the "event" triggers the mechanical rights (copying the music to a tape, a CD, a file, etc.) or the performance right (just playing the file, as with radio or streaming audio). Interestingly radio is considered exempt from royalty payments, but Internet radio is not.
For live performances, there is still a royalty due to the songwriter/publisher, and this is often negotiated by their representative, like ASCAP or BMI. I wouldn't have to pay very much for performing "White Christmas" but Bruce Springsteen might.
So trading concerts is, as Zevele says, dependent on what the band thinks (whether they are willing to assign you the rights), but also what the song writer thinks (they may not agree with the band).
I've probably butchered the above in some way which someone can correct, but you can see it isn't simple. If you add to this the fact that a lot of old contracts never envisioned the Internet and digital distribution, you have a mess. In addition, the record labels clearly would like to slow things down, extend their CD sales, and try to maintain their control of the flow of money associated with music.
There is still another complication, and that is that the five major record labels (Universal, Sony, EMI, Warner, and BMG) are barred (at least in theory) from getting together to set up a new system, since that could well be considered a violation of anti-trust laws.
There are also a lot of politics involved. For example, AOL (who owns Warner) and Microsoft (who may eventually own them all) consider themselves arch-rivals, so if you choose to play in one camp, you make yourself enemy of the other. The labels are also afraid of the power of Microsoft to muscle in on their business. They don't want to give them a start.
I think that either Congress or the U.S. Copyright office will have to sort this all out before anything very good happens.
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Topic: IT'S LEGGAL SHARE WMA??? (Read 2382 times)