Irving Azoff Calls On Music Industry To “Work Together”
Here we look at some of the highlights from Irving Azoff's recent keynote at the NMPA, particularly regarding artist's rights and the importance of what's best for the creators. Azoff's efforts now also includes this campaign signed by 180 major artists.
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Guest post from Artist Rights Watch
Irving Azoff highlighted the gridlock on artist rights in Washington in his June 8 keynote at the annual meeting of NMPA, the music publishers trade association.
“The music industry has never been more powerful and popular and we as an industry have never done a shittier job of rallying together as one industry,” Azoff said. “We should work together to solve the root of the problem” — fair compensation.
“I had one artist who was making $450,000 a year between all of his royalties,” Azoff said. Now after the digital revolution, he is down to making “$40,000 a year.”
But he noted that digital services like Youtube, which have very nice executives working for them, say they are not making any money on their ad-supported services, Azoff noted. “How can you sit there and say we can’t afford a couple of hundred millions of dollars for your industry, when their market cap is worth a half a trillion dollars?”
Azoff noted that the industry has been operating under the consent decree since the 1941. “Anyone with sense would ask, why does the DOJ think we still need a consent decree,” he observed. “I think its deplorable.”
Finally, Azoff noted that no matter what role he played in the industry, as a manger, a promoter, a label executive, “If you do what’s right by the creator” — whether that’s the artist or songwriter — “it will eventually be right for your company as well.”
It would be nice if Google learned that lesson.
Azoff is doing some great things for music and I applaud him for taking a stand and getting others to join him. I’m disappointed more individuals who made an incredible living from their work don’t support these efforts with greater generosity of time and money.
Five years ago when I started working for artists rights, many of those in the industry looked me right in the eye and said, it’s over don’t waste your time. We are only going to be successful with tens of thousands of artists on board, otherwise at the eleventh hour the freehadists are going to rise up and intimidate congress into backing down.
So just how badly do you want to win? We can only shine a light. http://www.takedownstaydown.org
YouTube, nor any other pure-play internet company, owes the music industry nothing. Google, and all of it’s subsidiaries, simply follows established law, and modify their business models according to the competitive environment. The music industry certainly has the right to request (and implement) modifications of the DMCA laws. But that will not be enough at this late date. Internet companies will quickly mutate their models to accommodate their revenue goals, as they do every single day of every year, music industry, or no music industry.
The current music industry simply needs to learn how to visualize, predict, then stay a BIG step ahead of those modifications in a way that will benefit them. Being a step behind (never mind 30 steps behind), will do the music industry no good, and this latest move is no different.
Trip Wilkins