Puck

SoundExchange is a company charged with parceling out royalties to musicians. As Fred Wilhelms writes in today’s Counterpunch, SoundExchange “collects and distributes license fees for digital distribution of recordings; primarily satellite radio services and Internet streaming broadcasts (but NOT downloads). Over the years they have collected money for thousands of artists who don’t know about it.”

SoundExchange, according to Wilhelms, has been bad about trying to find artists who are owed money. The reason? SoundExchange gets to keep the money if they can’t find the artist! Finally, though, SoundExchange has made public its list of “missing artists.” It’s an amazing list: how can it be they can’t find the well-known band Dinosaur Jr.? Or the great Japanese turntabalist, DJ Krush (whose many albums are out on the execrable Sony label)? Continuing with just the names under “D”, how can they not find Dishwalla, whose latest album, as far as I can tell, was released in 2005?

I’m not surprised SoundExchange can’t find Django Reinhardt–he’s been dead since 1953. “Django” is a Romany name meaning “I awake.” Wake up, SoundExchange! These individuals or bands, their heirs or the living being themselves, are easy to find. As Wilhelms says, “In the first two hours after I had the list, and even before I had gotten completely through the “A” entries, I found five people you and your staff were not able to find in six years. And just so I’m clear on this, these were people I did not know when I started the search. At most, it took three telephone calls to find a current contact and pass on the information about registration. I actually came up with one by checking Directory Assistance in his hometown.” As I’ve written repeatedly, the efforts of corporate “entities” (the quotes are to mitigate my abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment) to rip off artists–especially musicians–is one of the great ongoing crimes of capitalism. As if to underscore the criminality of corporate behavior, the SoundExchange “missing artists” list is valid only through this December. (BoingBoing has a bit more on this.)

More on SoundExchange: I’ve been in email contact with Fred Wilhelms, and he tells me the following:

The release of this list is strictly a CYA move. The excuse they gave me last year for not publicizing it is that they didn’t want unscrupulous middlemen to pick over the list and get artists to give them a cut of the money for “finding” them first. The problem with this excuse is that anyone could go to the SoundExchange site and go through their database, plugging in names to see if they had money there.

That boingboing piece was provoked by a conversation I had with Fred von Lohmann on a mailing list. I love it when I get someone like Fred to pass things along, he carries a lot of weight.
My professional life is focused simply on getting artists paid, so when something like this SE fiasco happens, it really annoys me.

Here’s some background on why I got that letter from John that I quoted in Counterpunch:
Several years ago, I was publicly critical of SoundExchange at a music conference. Simson tried to call my bluff by asking, in front of witnesses at the conference, for my help in finding the artists for whom they had collected money. I have a well-earned rep for finding money for artists, so finding artists for money that was already there sounded like a snap.

It turned out I called John’s bluff. For more than two years, I bugged SoundExchange to get me started on the detective work, and they never even responded to my calls and letters. Finally, a year later, after I had given one newspaper interview where I was critical again, and JUST BEFORE I was about to serve on another conference panel, he called me.

To cut to the chase, he offered to send me the complete list of everyone they hadn’t found. The only thing, I had to promise not to tell anyone about the list. I couldn’t even call a friend and say “Do you know how to get in touch with X or his family?”

In other words, SE was taking the position “we want to find the people on the list, but we don’t want to let them know they are on it.” I washed my hand of them.