Pardon me while we take a short break from our regularly scheduled blogging…

I had a brilliant idea for the holidays. I thought it would be great to take some of my favorite Christmas music — like the Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan doing a God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings combo — and make a little compilation to give away to 15 or 20 people.

Of course, being the upright, law-abiding citizen that I am, I immediately sought permission to proceed. I started with APRA, the Australasian Performing Right Association, in the hopes that they could just send me a bill for $100 or whatever and I’d be legit.

My hopes were in vain. APRA told me they only handle the writing of the songs. In a way, this was good news: most of the songs I wanted to include — like Metallica and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra doing Carol of the Bells — were “traditional”, and therefore out of copyright. For those few songs that were in copyright, the fee was $0.05 per song, per copy, for a total of around $4.00.

I can handle $4.00.

Unfortunately, the buck didn’t stop with APRA. In addition to compensating whoever wrote the song, I’d also have to compensate whoever performed the song — like Patty Loveless doing O Come All Ye Faithful. To address that, I had to get in touch with RIANZ: the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand. RIANZ, in turn, said that I had to contact each label independently, and intimated that I may not be successful.

Refusing to be defeated, I contacted the New Zealand office of Universal Music, recording label for many of the songs I had chosen to include — like Sting doing I Saw Three Ships. I emailed them the full list of songs and the exact usage I intended. I made it clear that these were giveaways and advised them of the quantities.

I received the following message back:

Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, we are unable to approve any Universal tracks for this kind of use. Sorry I cannot be of any further assistance

SLAM!

And they wonder why people download music illegally? Do they think that, by refusing me permission to pay them money to distribute these compilations, the intended recipients will now go out and buy the original CDs instead?

Meanwhile, Joel Tenenbaum is facing fines of over $1 million for sharing seven songs on Kazaa when he was a teenager, and the MPAA is trying to force ISPs to disconnect anyone it suspects of piracy. So they won’t let us pay for music, but they’ll punish the heck out of us for “stealing” it…

Come on, music industry. Get it together.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 2:05 am and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.