Inflation and US music mechanicals, 1976-2010
by Peter Alhadeff, Caz McChrystal
Global Business and Economics Review (GBER), Vol. 13, No. 1, 2011

Abstract: Recorded music is a commodity bundled with a number of intellectual property rights. This paper illustrates the conflict over the value of one of the most important rights of music, the so-called mechanical rate that the record labels pay to songwriters and their publishers for the reproduction, in a recorded medium, of their work. There has been a serious devaluation of the US mechanical rate against inflation since the Copyright Act of 1976. As Congress and the CARP Tribunal are ultimately involved in setting terms, the implication is that songwriters and their publishers are losing power in the USA against the record labels. For a variety of reasons, the phenomenon seems to be particular to the USA. It has also gone unnoticed in the current music business literature. Scholars who succeed in clarifying musicians' legal rights should also consider basic economics as a useful analytical tool.

Online publication date: Tue, 23-Sep-2014

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