Pribek

Let’s say for instance, that you and your garage band have been in the woodshed a couple of nights a week for several months. And, you’ve been working up some of your favorite quirky cover tunes. It’s getting pretty groovy, you’ve got a couple chicks hanging around dancing barefoot on the concrete floor when you practice, and you want to get the word out, spread some love, make a name and roll the dice.

So, the plan is to have the keyboard guy bring his laptop over one night and you cats will record your best version of your favorite one of said quirky cover songs and graciously let the public download it for free over the web.

And let’s just say, that people just love your innocent charm, bad boy attitude, ambivalence, sarcasm, tattoos, pierced tongues and rockin’ sound. And, for those reasons, an enormous amount of people, let’s say 100,00, bypass the glut of other free mp3s available all over the web and they download your quirky cover song.

And….let’s just say that 6 months down the road, nobody from any label has called, no text message from Jimmy Kimmel’s people, and the only gig you can find is the one where you rent the Knight’s of Columbus Hall out for a night, the bass player’s wife is pregnant again and, everybody decides to part ways temporarily, amid vows of loyalty and promises to never stop rockin’ over a few warm beers.

Life goes on, nobody got hurt and, hey! At least you are on 100,000 iPods.

Have you ever heard of the Harry Fox Agency?

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t. HFA is in the business of administering music publishing. They collect money from music sales, take a percentage, and disperse the rest to music publishers who, in turn, take their percentage and disperse the remaining portion the the songwriter(s).

From Billboard…

HFA offers new mechanical licensing options for limited downloads, interactive streams, and ringtones through its bulk-licensing program and continues to offer statutory rate mechanical licensing for permanent digital downloads.

The Copyright Royalty Board set the mechanical rate for songs at 9.1 cents, plus 0.2 cent for each additional minute beyond five minutes; ringtones for 24 cents; and limited download and interactive streaming royalty rates are based on a percentage of income from online digital service providers.

In straight talk, every time someone downloads a song at iTunes, 9.1 cents out of that 99 cents goes the Harry Fox Agency and then some to publishers, and some to songwriters.

That 9.1 cents is really the big sticking point. That’s why you can’t put your cover song on the various social networks etc. for free download legally at this time. It’s still a future-world promise at this point. Reason is, none of these social networks etc. have figured out how to make 9.1 cents per song download through advertising.

So, back to the above tale of the lovable, underdog garage band. As it stands, legally; these guys owe the Harry Fox Agency $9,100. HFA is known to have thorough but, not necessarily swift, accounting methods. But, one of the things about the digital age is; there is going to be a record of those 100,000 downloads forever so, swift accounting isn’t the big priority. That right there, is something I don’t hear anybody talking about.

Things could really open up if anybody could record a version one of their favorite tunes and put it up for public consumption at the place where the public is (social network). There are promises out there, speculation on the table but, until one of these outfits figure out how to make 9.1 cents; it’s not going to happen.