I often ask myself how any recording industry signed artist earns a crust when you factor all the tax dodges and double payments they take from the revenue before the artist even gets a look in, now
once again we are hearing how the RIAA set up organisation "Sound Exchange" is fast to take money on the artists behalf but makes virtually no effort to hand it over to the artist, despite taking a cut for their own activities (more like inactivity) from the same revenue
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15658SoundExchange is an unabashed former RIAA outfit which supposedly exists to collect money for artists and labels.
The trouble is: it doesn’t appear to be too successful, at least as far as the artists are concerned, not seeming to know who or where many of its clients, if they can be called that, are.
Nashville entertainment lawyer and p2pnet correspondent Fred Wilhelms has a few thoughtful observations to make on Simson and his Harvard lecture
"“SoundExchange brings in $140 million in revenue, of which 75% goes to the 31,000 performers they represent.”
Now, I think that the blogger got this wrong, and I have asked him to clarify it. I suspect that Simson said that 75% of the organization’s receipts are paid out as royalties to artists AND labels.
The important thing is that SoundExchange expenses appear to be running at 25% of revenue. This is substantially higher than the 20% that SX supposedly voted as a self-imposed limit on expenses (and one that would not raise eyebrows at the IRS).
Then Simson apparently said that SX has failed to track down 40,000 other artists. 40,000 unfound artists.
They’re paying 31,000. They are not paying 40,000, and they know the names of that 40,000, so God knows how many they miss in sampling that would increase that number.
Being unable to find 55% of the artists who have been reported after six years isn’t a long tail problem, unless the tail begins where the neck leaves off. It is either sheer incompetence or willful indifference to the charter it was given. If anyone at SoundExchange was capable of shame, this ought to provoke it.
I think when looking at these hidden royalty "slush fund" numbers some serious questions need to be asked and the US department of justice should be the ones asking, Sound Exchange need to deliver or close, there is no middle ground in this failure to compensate the artists, of course people might well want to ask more questions such as what happens to all those $3000 "music mafia extortion" settlements, it seems the artists don't get a cent of that either, are you seeing the pattern yet folks ?
