Letter I posted to SAMRO have not yet received a response. Good evening My name is Linda Sitole, and I have been closely following the SAMRO music license, issue. I have called your company to enquire about but I only get vague answers from them. I am writing to you as a composer, record label owner and soon to be publisher who owns all my work. I push my music as best as I can, and some things do not come as easy such as radio airplay, or tv synchronization. When I first heard about the DJ licence, (a year or 2 ago) I was for it, even though I did not have any detailed knowledge about it. It gave me hope as a musician that it is possible to make a living out of music, but as I dived deeper knowing with absolute surety that my music is being played in a lot of places, venues, events and by many DJs, what seemed to trouble me is if all these venues and DJS play all this music and they are not obligated to submit playlists, then how does SAMRO, know that everyone is getting their fair share, what system are you guys using to check the accuracy and how do you know it is going to the right people. I will quote something that your CEO has been quoted to have said in an interview on 5fm, I only read the transcript so I cannot confirm how valid it is SAMRO: That license covers you for whatever you play. In an ideal world, people will tell us that they played this song but it is impossible, well, not impossible but it is very onerous to ask a DJ after playing a 3 hour set to write down every song he/she has played and submit a play list. The license covers you to play anything you want to play. We then have a lot of work because what we do is we take a bunch of different information from different places, we take information from radio stations, we take play lists that we do get from venue owners and we use that to calculate how to pay the composers on the other side, so all this money that comes inis put into one pool under the general licensing and it is then distributed and paid out to composers whose music has been assumed to have been used in different venuesfrom the different reports that we get back. This causes me to worry about the thousands of up and coming musicians who are unable to get their music on radio, but their only chance to get their music hear are clubs and venues as these places do not have much stricter criteria for your music to be heard and. Those. Up and coming artists who get a lot of their music at venues outside the mainstream. Their share of the money will fall back to the commercial artists who get tons of air play and who have the money and resources to get their music to be played on multiple avenues. If this is the bases of how you distribute these fees then it is not a fair game. Leaves a lot of loopholes for laziness, inaccuracy, corruption. I wonder if SAMRO has the interests of ALL musicians or just those signed by major labels, who can afford to lobby SAMROs rules of regulations. I may be just another musician who probably misunderstood this whole issue but if that is the case I need you guys to clarify for me (In as much detail as possible), how am I misunderstanding this and how does this Organization serve the needs of All musicians in the Distribution of its funds. Both those who are full members of SAMRO and also for those who remain APPLICANTs, who are always notifying their work at SAMRO. Thank You Linda Sitole
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:07:27 +0000