[Dixielandjazz] Another take on internet & other radio royalty fees.

[Steve Barbone]

Here's a counter point to the radio royalty story.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Radio Listeners Seem to Buy Less Music

NY TIMES - By ALEX MINDLIN - July 23, 2007

During the past month, musicians and record labels have resumed their
decades-old fight to make AM and FM stations pay royalties to performers. A
new group, the MusicFirst Coalition, has publicized a six-month-old study
that suggests that radio play hurts record sales.
 
The study, written by Stan Liebowitz, an economics professor at the
University of Texas at Dallas, compared record sales and music radio
listening in some 100 American cities from 1998 to 2003. It found that, very
roughly, an hour¹s worth of radio listening per person per day, over the
course of a year, corresponded with a 0.75 drop in the number of albums
purchased per capita in a given city. Professor Liebowitz has proposed that
people use radio listening as a substitute for buying music.

The broadcast industry has pointed to radio¹s power to create top-selling
songs. But Professor Liebowitz said that while radio could elevate some
songs above others, its overall effect was to depress the market for albums.