BMI distributes more royalties than ever before
September 12th, 2008
Record labels and performance-rights groups have spent the last few years going bezerk about “lost revenue” due to illicit sharing and performance of copyrighted works. They’ve been blaming everyone from P2P networks to Girl Scouts for the steady decline in their profits (which probably has more to do with the ever-growing market for music downloads á la iTunes). It’s funny, then, amidst all these panicking businesspeople, that BMI, one of the USA’s largest performance-rights organisations, has announced a record turnover for the 2008 financial year.
Their press release says they made $901 million this year, and will dispense $786 million in royalties to copyright holders. Imagine that, a global recession looming and your business’ profits only increase 7.2% this year! Time to tighten the belts, maybe?
September 12th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
BMI hasn’t been complaining about lost profits because BMI doesn’t earn profits; they operate on a non-profit basis. All revenue after expenses is distributed to songwriters and publishers. Currently, about 88 cents of every dollar goes out the door. Furthermore, revenues and distributions have increased steadily for several decades. Downloading has nothing to do with the revenues of performing right organizations. They don’t sell CDs or singles, so if you steal music, it does impact a lot of creative people, but it doesn’t reduce the revenues or distributions of BMI. It’s absurd to suggest that anyone is panicking at the performing right organizations. It is simply foolhardy to assume all companies in the music business have the same business model and similar problems. It just doesn’t work that way.
September 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
While I stand by my suggestion that major organisations in the music industry (including BMI and ASCAP) have been growing increasingly uncomfortable about lost revenue in recently, I accept that I may have used the term “profit” incorrectly in referring to BMI.