David Lowery talks about the pre-1972 battle, the DOJ and streaming revenues

David Lowery sat down with Salon’s Scott Timberg for another long-form interview on the future of the music industry, in which he continues to criticise the attitude of streaming services and questions the feasibility of niche content if streaming is going to take over as a consumption method.

First of all Lowery talks about pre-1972 recordings and the fact that digital services like Pandora are not paying performance royalties on them as technically they are not covered by federal copyright law. He believes that corporations like Pandora are just trying to cut corners and theirs is a lose-lose strategy, because artists are bound to win in the end. He believes that Pandora’s stance is driven by the need to pursue short-term stock gains for the company, but that this may well be a damaging strategy for the company as and when they have to pay back all the money they have withheld over the years.

The same corporate “sleazy” attitude is what is driving large radio conglomerates to fight the prospect of paying royalties to performers, he says: “We’re one of six countries in the world, and the only modern democracy, that doesn’t pay performers royalties for getting played on the radio.” Again, this gamble may pay off in the short term but could damage shareholders in the long term, he maintains.

Lowery goes on to say that because streaming services pay similar rates to everyone there’s no reason for people to be making anything besides mass-market music. He makes the analogy that whilst people are willing to pay more for organic food in order to get better quality, since everybody gets the same price on streaming services there may not be any space left for specialty genres. He states: “Maybe other systems will come up to fix it [this problem] but I don’t think it bodes well for anything other than the most mass-market hind of music.”

During the interview, he states knowing for a fact that one of the heads of a major label is “freaking out” about streaming as he is realising it is not delivering in the way it was supposed to. Lowery also argues that musicians should have a way of opting out of this collective marketplace, give notice to the copyright office and be done with it. Artists can choose not to appear on on-demand streaming service but have no say over their presence on internet radio services like Pandora.

Finally, he talks about the Department of Justice and the current proceedings to review the consent decrees. In his opinion, the DOJ has monopoly backwards as it puts publishers and songwriters under anti-trust supervision whilst not realising that the companies songwriters are supposedly colluding against (Google, YouTube, Pandora…) are the real monopolies.

Lowery believes that the over-reaching of the DOJ will have to be challenged in court and may need to go all the way to the supreme court as essentially the consent decrees consist because of a case that has been open since 1941. He argues that the judicial branch can’t make the law but has done so in this case since the have created “a statutory right for broadcasters to have our songs.”

Lowery as usual makes some interesting points that are likely to further stir the debate around streaming. Whilst his views on pre-1972 recordings and around the need for US radio to pay performance royalties on sound recordings are widely shared in the music industry, his comments on streaming are still pretty controversial. Majors have thrown their weight behind streaming services and it will be very interesting to see whether the tensions described by Lowery in at least one major labels in regards to streaming’s failure to deliver on the scale it promised will become public over the next few months.


(Andrea Leonelli)