It appears the next group on the hit list after dentists is the hairdressers.
SOCAN has announced their new focus and urges hairdressers who play Canadian music to pay their royalties or feel the wrath.
I like to see artists of all kinds get paid for their work, especially after most of the prime movers and trailblazers of the 50’s, 60’s & 70’s got screwed out of the rights to their work. Not to mention the royalties. To this day many of them still fight or their heirs do. Frank Zappa and David Bowie were among the pioneers in the effort to own and distribute your own material.
The opportunity I see in these cases (dentists, hairdressers, coffeeshops) is to hire local musicians to write and create ”custom” house music. It may cost them more in the short term but if the musician sells them the rights to use it exclusively … who can complain?
The musician can then garner fans for their “other” (read: for sale) material from salon patrons.
Or small business owners could create an agreement to play local original music with various performers that has not been published or under the mandate of SOCAN. Create compilation disks or samplers for salons to play either for free or a small fee.
Necessity is the mother of invention. If you don’t like someone dictating what you do or how much you pay … work around it, without breaking the law.
Perhaps ALL Canadian music falls under the powers of SOCAN, I don’t know. There are many sides to every story and here SOCAN tries to educate creative types about posting intellectual property online.
I believe an opportunity exists for something better to come of this phenomenon, I can smell it.
