Black Radio and the "Performance Rights" Toll Booth
Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on Wed, 05/20/2009 -

www.blackagendareport.com/

The cynically misnamed "Performance Rights" legislation will not benefit performers. It will extract a premium from radio broadcasters, killing some, and transforming others for the worse. It will create another piece of "intellectual property" which the recording industry is poised to benefit from at the expense of artists, radio broadcasters and the public, and legaiize payola. And once the performance rights toll booth is established in broadcast radio, it can and will be deployed elsewhere. HR 848 is bad news for broadcasters, bad news for artists, and bad news for almost everybody.


Black Radio and the "Performance Rights" Toll Booth

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
Will Saving Black Radio Save Local News And Public Service?
A few weeks ago Radio One founder Cathy Hughes, echoed by Tom Joyner and dozens of other radio personalities, sounded the alarm. HR 848 they cried, a bill to make stations pay a “performance rights” fee for every song played, was a mortal threat to black radio. In a widely circulated blog post which was echo-blasted to everybody on any Radio One email list, Hughes cited black radio's stellar contributions of news, diversity and local content as reasons why African American communities should rally to protect it. She even claimed black talk and gospel were “money losing formats” as if these were public services and tithes offered out of Radio One's bottomless reservoir of corporate good will.
The laughter was pretty hard to suppress. Commentators like Paul Scott and Mark Anthony Neal ran columns titled “Should We Save Black Radio?” and “Should Black Radio Die?” to which they answered “probably not” and “maybe.” The widely known fact, as BAR's Glen Ford pointed out six years ago in “Who Killed Black Radio News” is that Radio One led the industry in purging news, public service and local content of all kinds from its airwaves in favor of cheap, syndicated, uninformed talk, mostly about celebrities and relationships. Radio One's payola-influenced playlists are indistinguishable from its white-owned black radio competitors. Perhaps to protect their audiences from too many confusing facts, Tom Joyner, Cathy Hughes and the rest of the "save black radio" posse never mention that white broadcasters, the National Association of Broadcasters in fact, are just as opposed to HR 848 as they are, for most of the same reasons. So the truth is surely more complicated than Cathy Hughes and her posse would have us believe.
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