Artists’ earnings and copyright: A review of British and German music industry data in the context of digital technologies

Abstract

Digital technologies are often said (1) to enable a qualitatively new engagement with already existing cultural materials (for example through sampling and adaptation); and, (2) to offer a new disintermediated distribution channel to the creator. A review of secondary data on music artists' earnings and eight in-depth interviews conducted in 2003-04 in Britain and Germany indicate that both ambitions have remained largely unfulfilled. The article discusses to what extent the structure of copyright law is to blame, and sets out a research agenda.

Creativity, Copyright and the Creative Industries Paradigm

“…Most of this research has studied earnings from sales of work, fees and wages but recently, there has been additional interest in earnings specifically from royalties and other remuneration from the use of copyright works. As might be expected, the same skewed distribution of income is observed in relation to copyright earnings – those of the superstars are very high and the others' are derisory (Towse, 2001b; Kretschmer and Hardwick, 2007).…”

Copyright and Artists: A View From Cultural Economics

“…Towse (1999) found evidence of the value of remuneration for the public performance of sound recordings resulting from performers' rights that were newly introduced in the UK following the EU Rental Directive and compared the figures for those of similar Swedish and Danish societies, which had been in existence for some 20 years (the figures and distributions were all similar). Kretschmer (2005) uses figures submitted by the PRS in its evidence to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission enquiry into its operation and in addition provides data for the German performing rights society GEMA and the Künstlersozialkasse (social insurance fund for artists) on the distribution of remuneration. Matsumoto (2002) presents detailed figures on performers' remuneration earnings for sound recordings in Japan.…”

Economics of music publishing: copyright and the market

“…It has often been said that many of the most frequently performed works were written without the benefit of copyright laws; notable attempts have been made to test this empirically, finding little evidence either way (Baumol and Baumol, 1994;Scherer, 2004). Cultural economists and others have questioned the incentive that copyright offers composers and other creators (Towse, 2001: Kretschmer, 2005. Copyright protects composers as they seek to exploit their works but in doing so they inevitably have to assign their rights to a publisher, for whom the acquisition of the copyright becomes an investment in a profit-making business (Caves, 2000).…”