MTV happily played expensive music videos but paid no broadcast royalties in the US, allowing its parent company Viacom to become one of the biggest media companies in the world.
Copyright law, tortuously evolved from the days of selling sheet music, calls for payment when music is transferred to a listener: purchase of a recording, performance royalties, broadcast royalties, licensing fees.
The amount was not publicly disclosed but was believed to be £20,000 per episode, plus repeat broadcast royalties.
Wavebreak, which produces broadcast quality HD royalty free film footage and animation, has raised €350k of funding led by the Bank of Ireland Seed and Early Stage Equity Fund managed by Kernel Capital.
Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, called for lower rates for streaming services and for equivalent royalty systems across media, because Pandora must pay labels millions of dollars in royalties that broadcast radio companies are not required to pay.
For perspective, to reach the exact same audience, Pandora currently pays over 4.5 times more in total royalties than broadcast radio for the same song.
Payments for radio broadcasts of songs, called royalties, have been a source of disagreement within the recording industry for decades.
"I was recently with him and he was talking about being in the studio with the producer for Lady Gaga, who is with Sony/ATV publishing," says Del Bryant, president and C.E.O. of Broadcast Music Inc., a royalty collection agency.
"I am here to tell you," she wrote of one Simon Oakes, "that his melting approach conceals an astonishing pre-happy-hour horniness that has earnt him, among other nicknames, 'Any time Oakes.' " Americans soon got their first look at Tina Brown in the NBC broadcast booth as a royalty expert, next to Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley, for the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981.
The sole type of digital broadcast that Congress kept royalty free: the NAB's baby, HD radio.
Mobile music discovery platform Shazam is reacquiring the intellectual property it sold to music royalty outfit Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) back in 2005.
