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Pandora Reaches $90 Million Settlement For Streaming Pre-1972 Songs
Topic Started: Oct 24 2015, 01:41 AM (131 Views)
Webster
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Think Progress: Pandora Reaches $90 Million Settlement For Streaming Pre-1972 Songs

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If you’ve been listening to classic rock on your free Queen Pandora station or grooving to the vocals in Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” you’ve been doing so at the expense of the writers and musicians behind the iconic tunes. But while Pandora reached a $90 million copyright settlement with record companies Thursday for streaming songs released before 1972, the lawsuit signifies a growing tension between content creators and newfound tech companies.

Pre-1972 songs, such as Al Green’s romantic reconciliation ballad “Let’s Stay Together,” no longer have federal copyright protections but still have some coverage on the state level, which can put music streaming services on the hook for royalty payments.

To make amends, Pandora agreed to pay royalties to the music industry’s advocacy group, the Recording Industry Association of America, for streaming classic recordings through the end of 2016. Pandora and RIAA will have to draw up a new agreement if it wants to continue streaming oldies after 2016.

Satellite radio company SiriusXM, which the RIAA sued alongside Pandora in 2013, paid $210 million to settle the dispute earlier this year. But both companies are still entangled in copyright battles with recording companies over mid-century recordings, and have yet to hash out how much the company’s should pay in royalties per song.

The settlement is the latest in a string of copyright disputes over the fair use and consumer ownership of entertainment in the Internet Age. Twitter took a stand against copyright violations earlier this month when it shut down Deadspin and SBNation’s accounts for posting gifs of copyrighted football highlights.

Producer and singer Pharrell Williams lost his “Blurred Lines” lawsuit against Marvin Gaye’s family, who claimed crooner Robin Thicke’s controversial hit borrowed sounds from Gaye’s 1977 “Got To Give It Up” recording. Williams and Thicke are appealing the jury’s verdict to pay $7.3 million in royalties to Gaye’s estate. Following the jury verdict, Williams commented that such application of copyright law are too broad and stifle creativity.

“This applies to fashion, music, design… anything,” Williams told the Financial Times. “If we lose our freedom to be inspired, we’re going to look up one day and the entertainment industry as we know it will be frozen in litigation. This is about protecting the intellectual rights of people who have ideas.”

Last year, pop sensation Taylor Swift famously tangled with on-demand music hub Spotify in 2014, demanding a higher cut — not just for herself, but for future musicians who will most certainly measure their success through free streaming services rather than CD sales. As Swift penned in a Wall Street Journal column addressing the issue: “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.”

Tech companies are caught in the middle of this creative tug-of-war, where content creators — including writers, photographers, vloggers, musicians, and filmmakers — rely on social media and streaming services such as SoundCloud to promote their work but then struggle to get paid fairly for their intellectual labor.

The result is a slew of lawsuits and new business models that might kill the free content model to which consumers have grown accustomed. (Remember free e-books from your favorite author? Or risking malware infestation just to download songs using the file-sharing service LimeWire or Napster?)

Even YouTube plans on charging an ad-free, $9.99 monthly subscription fee, the bulk of which is supposed to go back to the content creators. But the YouTube Red model debuted Wednesday may have a downside — less money for the YouTubers who may lose ad dollars by switching to the subscriber model.

....thoughts?
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