Summary
Radio One, which owns 54 radio stations and garnered $316 million by playing, primarily, works of African-American artists for an African-American audience, refuses to pay a penny to the people who make the music.
Music artists are paid when you buy one of their CDs or download a song from iTunes, but the corporate radio giants are exploiting a 1920's-era legal loophole that denies performers compensation for radio play. While they deny Black artists payment, they essentially make tens of millions of dollars in ad revenues on their backs, thanks to the radio audience that the music attracts. It's a practice that exists in only three despotic countries: North Korea, Communist China and Iran; hardly governments for America to emulate.Paying musicians - or any worker - a fair wage for their work is as American as apple pie and the flag. The "big radio" bosses say that paying musicians for the music they perform amounts to an unfair tax on their empire. We can be certain that a plantation owner faced with a demand for wages from a sharecropper felt much the same way. What neither these corporate giants nor the plantation heeded was the call not to wring your bread from the sweat of another man's face.Music artists are paid when you buy one of their CDs or download a song from iTunes, but the corporate radio giants are exploiting a 1920's-era legal loophole that denies performers compensation for radio play.See the full content of this document
Extract
Civil Rights, Economic Justice for Black Musicians
Jazz fans remember the immortal Jelly Roll Morton as the author of many of the genre's most memorable songs, one of its first artists to record, and a larger than life talent who dominated the Ja...
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