There are two sides to every argument, or so I'm told, and to that end the US's National Association Of Broadcasters is about to launch a major advertising campaign to give the other side of the debate regarding radio royalties in America.
As previously reported, unlike other Western countries, in the US terrestrial radio stations do not pay royalties for music they play on their stations - mainly because for years the radio owners said they were giving record labels free publicity. Moves are afoot to push for new laws that would force radio stations to pay albeit relatively modest royalty fees to the record industry, and the issue has been much discussed in US political circles of late.
Earlier this week global record industry trade body the IFPI and UK royalties people PPL published a petition signed by 6000 artists around the world calling on the new royalty rules to be introduced. Now the radio industry's trade body is fighting back, basically by saying it's a bit rich of the major record companies to use artists in the fight for radio royalties because - they say - some labels have a reputation for being very bad at paying out royalties to artists, and therefore artists should be more angry with the record companies than the radio stations.
Which, while true to a certain extent, doesn't seem to be that compelling a reason as to why terrestrial radio stations in the US should get to play music for free when radio stations in most other countries, and satellite and online stations in the US, don't. Even if it can be hard for artists to extract royalties from their record companies, surely its better to have 'hard to extract royalties' than no royalties at all. But there you go.