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"I\u2019m not going to knock Billy Bragg here. \u201CMr Love &amp; Justice\u201D is really as cool as they come. He\u2019s got quite a far-reaching audience. He\u2019s amassed much cred in his pockets over the years. No doubt about that.\nBut reading his opinion piece published in today\u2019s New York Times concerning what he calls \u201Cthe royalty scam\u201D conducted by Internet music portals like MySpace and Bebo, I can\u2019t help but say: wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.\nBragg says that social networking sites who\u2019ve managed to grow to serve tens of millions of individuals, and subsequently attract large purchase prices (MySpace\u2019s $580  million sale to News Corp, and AOL\u2019s recent acquisition of Bebo for $850m), should offer some recompense to the independent music artists who\u2019ve built themselves on those networks, and consequently built those networks into larger, more valuable entities.\nThe issue I take with that argument is...well...any such recompense simply wasn\u2019t part of the deal. A deal which remains to this day. The arrangement provided by social networks to musicians is exposure within the sphere created by those sites. And a way to promote new releases and live events. And, if artists (a term which is far too liberally applied today, I should add) so choose to do so, even offer an easy way to deliver downloads to fans. That\u2019s all. No financial contracts. No payments based on track playback counts. Nothing like that. All they get is a vast ocean of music geeks to convert into followers. Or at least attempt to.\nWhich I imagine is something a great number of musicians have enjoyed quite a lot so far. Considering the fact that, a few years ago, they were altogether unable to build any popular backing without selling plastic out of the back of a van or tossing their tracks onto file sharing sites that could not effectively facilitate lots of \u201Cnew discoveries\u201D of their recordings, the ability to launch a fairly significant presence on social networks is a huge win for indie acts.\nDon\u2019t get me wrong. I believe in just payment to musicians on radio, whether over-the-air or over-the-Web, as well as through CD and download sales. I think that the record companies have provided the majority of working musicians with ridiculous contractual conditions and have not delivered what I would consider to be a fair percentage of retail income. I think a good portion of \u201Csigned\u201D artists deserve more. A lot more. But as far as social networks like MySpace and Bebo are concerned, there\u2019s really no basis to demand that they provide royalties. They didn\u2019t start their businesses with the aim of directly sustaining musicians, financially speaking. They strove to become social networks. Big social networks. Full of tons of different people. Some musicians. Most not. Yes, musicians can build homes on such networks. And they can reap promotional benefits. But that\u2019s about it. And musicians know this. They\u2019re seem okay with the trade.\nAt the very least, they are more content than they would be if they had to continue submitting themselves, one demo at a time, to the critics at record labels for contractual consideration. Soul-sucking contractual consideration, at that.\nSo I say keep on keeping on, Billy. Your songwriting is superb. Without question. Only, your argument as stated in the Times piece doesn\u2019t hold up. Though the Birches have reaped a $600m windfall from their social experiment, they really have no obligation to provide any portion of it to musicians.\n(Image source: Wikipedia.org)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/03/22/bragg-bebo/>