Elijah Wald - How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll:

[medjuck]

I was particularly interested in some of the lawsuits that were filed during the 1940s to prevent music from being disseminated for "free" via the radio. Sounds an awful lot like the industry's hand wringing over file sharing...

When it comes to music industry stupidity, there is truly nothing new under the sun. They've been pulling essentially the same dumb stunts over and over for many decades.

The action in the 1940's actually stemmed from the musicians' union, calling a strike against record companies. The union felt that radio and jukeboxes were taking work away from live musicians, and they felt that record companies ought to compensate musicians for airplay. They won, and to this day, radio stations are required to pay licensing fees to music publishers and to the union. I'm not sure how the jukebox issue was settled, but I'll bet it's a similar deal.

I know they pay publishers. I didn't think they paid the union. (I could, of course, be wrong.)

[Jazzmoose]

Yeah, I know the songwriters make money whenever their songs are played on the radio, but the musicians?

[JSngry]

Nope.

But the Musicians Performance Trust Fund came out of the 1948 strike.

History: http://www.musicpf.org/AboutUs2.html

How the MPTF gives back to the community: http://www.musicpf.org/index.php

Musicians only get paid scale for all these gigs, and of course there's ""politics" involved, but... it gets live music to all kinds of people to whom it might not otherwise get to.

[BruceH]

Perhaps they destroyed themselves, too: "She said---I know what it's like to be dead..."

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/2fb0fbb0d...-w-fred-willard

Funny stuff.

[Brad]

Picked this up and am starting to read it. Not sure about the premise but we'll see.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I was particularly interested in some of the lawsuits that were filed during the 1940s to prevent music from being disseminated for "free" via the radio. Sounds an awful lot like the industry's hand wringing over file sharing...

When it comes to music industry stupidity, there is truly nothing new under the sun. They've been pulling essentially the same dumb stunts over and over for many decades.

The action in the 1940's actually stemmed from the musicians' union, calling a strike against record companies. The union felt that radio and jukeboxes were taking work away from live musicians, and they felt that record companies ought to compensate musicians for airplay. They won, and to this day, radio stations are required to pay licensing fees to music publishers and to the union. I'm not sure how the jukebox issue was settled, but I'll bet it's a similar deal.

There were scores of legal actions. The full rundown is set out at length in Russell & David Sanjek's "American popular music business in the 20th century" (OUP NY), which is bloody long but is actually a pot boiled version of Russell Sanjek's earlier book (in two volumes) with a similar title. R Sanjek was the first President of BMI.

As I recall, the guy who first tried to prevent his records from being played on radio was Fred Waring, who lost his case.

MG