dr.nojoke wrote:my tip to all who wants to keep freedom and independency:
stay away or leave the GEMA!!!
they rob your money and give it only successful artists (which have airplay).
Word!
For all underground artists and independent labels, there is no reason to register to the GEMA, because they never get the money back from the Clubplays.
Only all the commercial Artists get their money, because of all the Airplays.
Example:
Great Stuff and Craft Recordings are Sublabels of Sony/BMG. They want to be underground and independent, but their are Major... (u must sign the contract of BMG) (they are selling their souls to the devil -> Slave!)
you CAN release under some alias without gema, or you can sign a gema-exemption if you want to release on gema-labels. thats how we made it some years ago
I've studied the issue since a long time ago, and I can really tell you that collecting societies (ce from now on) will rob you if u r not a big seller (more than 1000.000 copies at least). nando and dr.nojoke are totally right on this one.
ce pay your money to top 40 artists / authors, but what happens if your records sounded some times in commercial radio, and it's being played in some clubs? nothing, you don't get to see a dime (unless you are a big fish on the market)...
the solution for this would be a new system for royalty calculation. a very robust software and hardware will do, but many years will pass by before this happens. but the day that id3 tags could be transmitted in a wireless way or so, and there are special receivers to gather and process the data, things will change for sure.
it's literally impossible for ce to exactly know all the music that is being played in a specific country at a certain moment.
technology created the controversy, and it will for sure solve it...
but anyway, who the hell ce think they are? how come they can prohibit releasing for free?
i'm sure that in 90% of net label cases it's not about communism, but about promotion and lack of money.
there are 2 sides, very clear, and we should be able to choose, one or the other, and why not, both. tbe dark side vs the bright side.
anyway, how's making loads of money selling records nowadays?
this is my own personal opinion, I may be wrong, or maybe not. I do believe I'm not. only time will tell
I found a piece of info that might be interesting even though it reffers to online radios and not net labels. but anyway, this info obviously can be in some way correlated with the main topic of this post.
I found it in www.boingboing,net (one of my favorite blogs) and it states this:
Webcasting reprieve carries a dangerous payload
SoundExchange has offered a poison pill to webcasters: add DRM to your streams, get a discount. SoundExchange are the gangsters who control the royalties for Internet radio, and they recently convinced regulators to raise the rates to insane heights, effectively shutting down all Internet music stations.
Now they've offered a dangerous reprieve to the largest webcasters: add DRM to your streams and you can pay a lowered rate. As EFF points out, this won't stop programs like Audio Hijack and Total Recorder from recording these streams, but it will give the entertainment industry the right to dictate technology choices to webcasters. Imagine if the record labels had been able to tell your local radio station that they had to play CDs, and weren't allowed to DJ from their MP3 payers -- it's invasive, overreaching and unreasonable.
SoundExchange is a front for the RIAA. It was part of the RIAA until 2003, and even today, each major label has a seat on its board. Independent labels and artists have reported that SoundExchange won't pay them the royalties they're owed -- instead, all that money seems to flow straight to the majors.
What's at stake here isn't just the implementation of DRM-laden streaming formats like WMA but also whether the RIAA will get to dictate the sorts of technologies that webcasters use in the future. After all, while DRM would certainly frustrate certain tools that allow users to time-shift, it won't make a lick of difference to software like Total Recorder and Audio Hijack that can record sound as it's outputted in unencrypted form to a sound card. You can bank on the RIAA coming back for more restrictions once it gets DRM in the door, as long as it can hold the threat of ridiculous royalty rates over webcasters' heads.
Link
See also:
SoundExchange won't enforce new royalty rates on Sunday?
Ex-RIAA agency "can't find" artists it owes money to, like Public Enemy
Germany has one of the strongest and most difficult set of copywrite laws in the world.
We had some trouble with our first release, there was a delay of 2 months due to having to deal with these annoying and controlling laws.
In the eyes of german law, unless a track is registered with GEMA (or relevant copywrite body in applicable country) the music is counted as "pirate" and cannot be sold in Germany. This is their way of keeping a stranglehold on the industry, and ensure they make maximum amount of money!
People should object to these guys, its the only way it will stop it getting worse and worse... it spells the end for independent music, its not going to hurt the big guys!
A project that we're involved in (based in Germany) has run into the 'GEMA' problem. They need the label to guarantee that every artist featured in the project (some 25+ artists) will _tell the label_ if they ever join GEMA!
So, basically, relying on artists (who aren't reknowned for contacting regularly) to let Kahvi know if they've released via GEMA otherwise there could be problems arising is entirely unreasonable and, of course, if you don't agree then no participation in the project.
Even if the artists aren't German! I find that highly amusing.
intellectual copyrights are a HUGELY profitable industry, music especially. at the moment, in our post-industrial societies, our worlds economy and monetary systems exist on top of a informational/technological foundation (information in the right context = money).
the control of information and it's profitability is something that institutional and business structures WANT, and badly. most social institutions that impose control over our worlds cultures have been becoming aware that they need to limit access to, and extract profit from, the internet.
netlables, creative commons liscensing, net neutrality (or the lack of) are all things we take for granted. i believe archive.org and other similar organizations are doing their best to protect the vast amounts of freedom and possibility on the internet, but it's not enough to stand against some more influential groups (like the recording industries of the world).
i know that i'm sounding really pretentious, and i'm using very bloated language, but it's not a simple situation. to use a simpler example; early rock music encouraged the american and european youth of the 50's to enjoy themselves, let go, and also encourage more sexual freedom. it was a response to an overly sexually repressed era. but in a very very short amount of time the genre of rock music was distributed, liscensed and controlled by a small group of recording companies.
the same thing is happening with freedom of speech, information and expression on the internet. people know there's money to be made, and some more over-bearing and insidious social institutions want to take away our freedom of choice and control on the internet, so they might guide us in the way they see best fit.
