last year I posted a story here that detailed the complete lack of effort being made to locate artists in the US and pay them their royalties that sound exchange, the official digital collection organisation had "collected" on their behalf, many out of the 40,000 artists have still not been found and due to time deadlines being put on the collection date for the royalties, just who is stealing the artists money here ?
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/18035Dan, a hard-core jazz musician who’s been playing for 25 years, signed up with Soundexchange, originally a creation of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
It was later spun off as an, “independent, nonprofit performance rights organization … designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to collect and distribute digital performance royalties for featured recording artists and sound recording copyright owners (usually a record label) when their sound recordings are performed on digital cable and satellite television music, internet and satellite radio (such as XM and Sirius).”
The trouble is, it does its job badly, or not at all, and like scores of others, Dan is still looking for returns from the outfit, which says it represents more than 31,000 featured artists.
But John Simson, the organisation’s front man, apparently admitted SX had, “failed to track down 40,000 other artists,” said Nashville entertainment lawyer Fred Wilhelms last year. Forty thousand unpaid artists? Yes, said Wilhelms »»»
So who are these people — the ones supposedly acting for, and look after the best interests of, all these musicians?
“There are nine ‘artist representatives’ on the SoundExchange board,” said Fred.
“All nine were invited to join the Board by the RIAA. Their absolute silence in the face of such anti-artist conduct as the failure to find and pay 40,000 artists is as clear an indictment of their complicity as anything could be. “They have betrayed the artists they say they serve
Not only but also, Fred names the names on the ‘other’ side of the table.
It seems Sound Exchange is a scam organisation even if by default as it most certainly is not delivering any revenue to 50% of the artists registered with them and to make revenue "disappear" when an artist has not signed up to collect it is downright thievery, it is just not their money to do anything with, its the artists money, the sooner the FCC looks into this scam the sooner the stink of commercial corruption will go away.
