News Media
This week the news is full of the fight between the Canadian Government and the big news media like Facebook over payment for use of Canadian news on their platforms.
This should be a simple matter. Newspaper prints original article. Article belongs to newspaper. You want to use it; you pay the going rate.
However, if you’re multibillionaire Mr. X, you don’t have to pay anything. Why not? Because nobody makes you.
Why should Canadians care? Because this affects the creative rights of all artists in the country, and a whole lot more.
We should also be concerned because between the larger news outlets and the internet giants, the mom-and-pop newspapers have been driven out of smaller Canadian cities. This makes those people dependent on Internet news sources. Which is not necessarily a good thing.
The news is a merchantable product. Those who produce it should be paid for it, and only the federal government has the clout to make it happen. Australia is leading the charge. We should follow along.
Streaming Services
It used to be that radio stations paid a small cut every time they played your song. ASCAP and other organizations collected the data and the cash and paid it out to the creators at the going rate.
Well, the streaming services still do the same, but the going rate is so small as to be worthless.
Why? Because the streaming services set the rate. Another case of meganationals throwing their weight around, and nobody stopping them.
Concert Tickets
On the other side of the coin, the price of tickets to live performances is going through the roof. Some estimates say Taylor Swift could take in a billion dollars on her latest tour.
There are three elements to this escalation, gleefully partaking at the trough. First comes Ticketmaster, which has a stranglehold on selling tickets. Then, if Ticketmaster hasn’t made enough, scalpers use online bots to buy thousands of tickets the moment they come out and then wait and sell them for inflated prices as the concert nears. Last and probably least, a very small number of top performers are raking in all the live-show money, and small local artists suffer.
Multiple methods are being used to reduce scalping. The technology is available to make sure that the person going to the show is the one that bought the original ticket. Then there’s dynamic pricing of tickets, where tickets are basically all on the free market, being sold for whatever the market will bear. In other words, the price still rises, but Ticketmaster and the performers take the scalper’s share as well.
Some performers refuse to charge huge amounts, but this kind of charity is hard to manage, and doesn’t always work.
My personal opinion is that it’s ridiculous to pay thousands of dollars to see anybody perform, when you can sit at home and watch the same show on HDTV. Let them price themselves out of the market. Then people who want the in-person experience will pay a reasonable price to see fine local performers.
Let’s think outside the box. Charge the exorbitant prices, then give the results to music schools.
Educational Institutions
Ten years ago, the Canadian Copyright Act was modified, and an “undefined education” category was created. Since then, schools at all levels have freely used more than $200 million worth of the works of Canadian creators and publishers. In this case, it’s the government that has the monopoly, and it’s saving money by not paying Canadian workers.
The Bottom Line
What’s behind this whole thing is the process of competition, which is supposed to keep prices down. These big companies have monopolies, Where they don’t, they indulge in price fixing, and they are getting away with it. Once you start checking out the situation, the little green image of greed pops up from every nook and cranny. The public ends up paying more and the average artist ends up getting less.
The only entity with the power to change this is the federal government. They need to take action — either breaking monopolies or regulating copyright fees — or the meganationals will continue to take what they want, and the rest of us will pay for it.