A HIGHER STATUTORY RATE WOULD NOT BE "MERELY A CEILING," AS ARGUED BY MUSIC The music publishing industry argues that a higher rate would The argument suggests, by way of conclusion, that since the out- The notions and conclusion are fallacious. They disregard basic The Licensing And Collection Process • The licensing of copyrights and the collection of mechanical royalties is a massive process. Organizations and procedures have been established that make it practical to handle the mass of detail economically and routinely. In sum, there are three main kinds of possible impacts of higher royalty rates: Reduction of riskier recordings, innovative, ethnic and jazz musical and younger composers and performers. The actual impacts of higher royalties would be a mixture of these kinds of results. No one can say for sure in what proportions they would come to pass. But each and all of them are undesirable to everyone, except to music publishing companies and other parties to copyrights. would operate to reduce employment in the recording industry. All of them None of these effects is called for on the grounds of compensating for the effects of inflation for copyright owners. Payments to them have been far outstripping inflation. - The proposed increase would result in a large windfall to the publishing industry not offset by any increased contribution by it to recorded music' its production, distribution or its enjoyment. 22 The music publishing industry uses agents to issue the many As regards the issuance of licenses for mechanical repro- The outcomes of this enormous licensing process must in all reality 24 When not issued at the statutory rate, licenses are issued at stan- Artist discount, where the performer is also the copyright owner. Block discount, where a record contains several tunes owned by Medley discount, where a tune or theme is used for a short period These three discounts together accounted for 10.1% of rates paid on tunes from regular price records. These standard discounts also explained all of the rates on these tunes that were paid below 24. Fully 84.5% of tunes on regular price records were paid at the 24 rate, and the remainder, 5.4%, were paid more than 2¢. We turn now to a discussion of records in the sample which were 25 |