The Newest Culprit In The “Record Sales Are Tanking” Mystery: Radio? Seriously?

Jerry Del Colliano, who runs the blog Inside Music Media, did a little bit of digging on the Web site run by SoundExchange–the performance-royalties organization that lobbied to raise streaming-radio rates–and he found some a few eyebrow-raising lines in the organization’s defense of that decision.

Specifically, elsewhere in the FAQ, the question of whether or not terrestrial radio pays performance royalties is brought up, and the reply begins “Not at this time.” Colangelo saw this not as a mere no, but as an indication that SoundExchange was going to try and get radio to pony up next:

This is going to get ugly.

The record labels are clueless as to how to reengage the music buying public with what the public wants. You don’t have to be a genius to know it’s not CDs and that CD sales will continue to erode. So why take it out on radio?

Radio is a chump.

All those music stations have been exposing the record industry’s new music and future stars and the labels have been making all the money from this free over the air exposure. Meanwhile the stations are also paying rights fees for the right to make the record labels rich.

Such a deal.

Who wouldn’t want it? Apparently the record industry. And that’s why you don’t have to look any further than the CRB flap over royalty rates for Internet streamers to know that radio stations are next.

Colangelo’s theory makes sense: Back in the days before album sales tanked, the exposure-to-sales relationship, at least as far as radio play spurring album sales, seemed a lot more symbiotic. (It’s worth noting that the higher-margin unit of the CD is used as the benchmark for declining sales in SoundExchange’s FAQ, and the idea of digital-track sales being sparked by exposure on radio and Webcasts is rarely, if ever, mentioned at all; in fact, elsewhere in the FAQ there’s an attempt to create a causative effect between the increase in Webcast listenership and the decline in CD sales.) Still, if SoundExchange does decide to go after the cash reserves of terrestrial radio, will it really try and upset the apple cart that it shares with radio’s largest players–or will it lobby for a decision, like the webcasting one, that hurts smaller stations more than the corporately owned ones? Either way, the direction seems like a colossally bad one, and one that will only really help the ever-shrinking number of artists who actually get played incessantly by Big Radio’s affiliates.

Questions And Answers: SoundExchange Webcaster II Decision [SoundExchange; PDF] Record Industry About To Stab Its Last Friend (Radio) In The Back [INSIDE MUSIC MEDIA™]