This is so far over the top that it’s ridiculous. I see both sides. My daughter is an artist and BMI helps pay her for radio airplay of her music. But she also does covers in her live show at venues all over. The record labels are scrounging to make money because CD sales are in the toilet. The artist, especially the smaller ones, gets screwed. Her main income is live shows, some CD and other merch sales, some download money, and then BMI royalties. It’s tough enough to get folks out for live shows. Once you have the “cover-song police” everywhere it’ll shrivel up and die.
BMI and ASCAP aren’t record labels. They are publishing companies.
In fact, we know of BMI today because of the attitudes of ASCAP in the 1940s. They would not publish “hillbilly” or “race” (later called R&B, by Atlantic Records) records.
ASCAP refused to published songs that were the offspring of hillbilly and r&b artists, rock and roll.
BMI would.
ASCAP also pushed the “payola” story (pay for play goes through every year of the music industry prior to rock and roll back to the 1880s) because they woke up to find that BMI held publishing on all of the “hits” and the “hit parade” model no longer worked (where every artist from Sinatra to Perry Como could cover the top songs of the day). Tutti Frutti? Can’t touch it. No, there must be some “other” reason that those songs became hits. It certainly couldn’t have been that anyone actually LIKED that noise.
Was money paid to get some songs noticed over others? Yes. Same as it always was and still is to this day.
And what’s more, payola worked. The songs we know as “hits” (and the ONLY songs we seem to associate with any given era anymore) are the products of payola. Not all songs that were hits or make moldy oldies lists are payola songs. But certainly there are some songs that got through with payola and they are still earning the publishers money to this day.
It’s getting so that even if you are a totally independent artist, you will find your receipts going to Big Media.
Myspace had a system for free downloads and has added some sort of storefront or mechanism for selling merch (downloads, shirts, etc) and they’ve sold a stake of that to the big media companies who will take a cut of every sale.
itunes and amazon downloads may be different, I don’t know.
But ultimately, the big boys are a monopoly (who’ve even been caught price fixing CDs to gouge customers) and they are only getting bigger.