Yet there’s another aspect of the New Mountain deal that is already drawing significant attention: it will see Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google and YouTube, acquire a minority stake in BMI via its independent growth fund, CapitalG.
The fact this news emerged just two days before MBW uncovered Google’s recent submission to the US Copyright Office – in which the Big G argues that the ingestion of copyrighted music into generative AI platforms is “fair use” – tells its own story.
Category: BMI
@SoundExchange CEO @MikeHuppe on Irony of Big Media Profiting from BMI Sale While Stiffing Artists #IRespectMusic #MusicFairness
@hypebot: Radio doesn’t pay performers, but iHeart will get $100M from BMI sale
BMI’s NonAnswer to “Affiliates”
Here’s BMI’s nonanswer answer to “BMI Affiliates” after being criticized about their recent moves to sell the company. The problem they have is that they are cashing out and don’t want to admit it. So rather than saying, yes we are cashing out and extracting the value of decades of songwriter and publisher work product, they kind of go sideways with nonanswers. You can always tell when they start answering questions that weren’t asked.
Example: “The three distributions issued under this new model were on average 9% higher than the corresponding ones from the previous year.” This brings up the old joke about hiring the royalty accountant and asking candidates to solve an accounting problem–the successful one simply asks “What do you want the answer to be?” How is it that three annual distributions each just happened to be 9% higher year over year? Why not 10% or 11% or 8% for that matter?
Then there’s this classic: “At the same time, we invested in new businesses, technologies and enhancements that will continue to improve the service we provide to our music creators, deliver even greater transparency around your royalties, and create new revenue opportunities to grow distributions outside of our traditional means.” Invested? With whose money? Usually when people start talking about “investing” they mean “we took your money without asking you and spent it on something we think you need more than the cash.” If they “invested” in new businesses what were these new businesses? How did they invest? Why didn’t they ask permission?
And then there’s this nonanswer: “It is easy to assume that if we kept doing business the way we always had, distributions would continue to grow.” Really? Who asked that question? Who made that assumption? Or was that the straw man assumption that BMI wanted to respond to?
Just remember, the timing of this post is way off and isn’t really responsive to much of anything in particular. They have clearly lost the initiative and are no longer driving the conversation. What took so long to produce this post? Very likely because all the smart people had to chime in and labor over crafting a response.
Maybe next time try responding to the actual questions the songwriters are asking–you know, your “affiliates”.
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