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The Recording Industry vs. The Music Performance Trust Fund
Biting the Hand That Feeds You

By: Frank Amoss, President, Local #7 AFM Orange County, California (Used By Permission)

The profession of musician has deteriorated since the day that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. This instrument of destruction has been the source of billions of dollars in profit to those who have embraced the industry which has promoted and developed the technology by which the sounds of a live performance can be preserved and sold over and over again. In some instances the performer shares in these profits and in some instances he/she does not.

It was in the early 1940’s that recording was recognized as the danger it had become to the live music makers of the world. Spearheading this awareness was James C. Petrillo. In an effort to combat this encroachment, Mr. Petrillo, as International President of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), led its members on a ban of making records. From 1941 to 1943 musicians, making a point for the salvation of their chosen profession, elected not to participate in their own destruction. At this point in history the overwhelming majority of musicians worthy of being recorded were members of the AFM. Consequently, this unified “strike” was effective in bringing the Recording Industry to the realization that it could not survive without its basic ingredient, live music(ians).

With this realization came the admittance that phonograph recordings were being responsible for the erosion of the general public’s enjoyment of live musical performances. The Recording Industry agreed that, in return for the cooperation of musicians in creating their product, it would establish a fluid dedicated solely to preserving this age-old human pleasure.

Thus, the Music Performance Trust Fund (MPTF) was born. A small percentage of the sales of recordings was dedicated to providing free concerts to the people. Compared to the large scale displacement of live music by recordings, which has escalated with the technology of sound reproduction, this fund is but a drop in the bucket. However, satisfied with this concession and resigned to the facts of life, musicians resumed participating in the recording of their music.

For nearly fifty years the MPTF worked for the benefit of all concerned. Millions were treated to free concerts, musicians prospered in the recording studios and the Recording Industry exploded into corporate giants, realizing profits that stagger the average comprehension. Still this did nothing to alter the path of technology and with each passing year more live music was replaced by a recorded product. People danced to records and were entertained by disc jockey programs on radio and television. No longer were musicians needed to render the Star Bangled Banner at public gatherings. Seats could be sold to the performance of a Broadway show or a ballet with no need for an orchestra in the pit. A more recent development is the use of phonograph records as sound tracks for motion pictures. Compare this use to the image of a studio orchestra as it creates a sound track from a score by John Williams or Elmer Bernstein.

As much as musicians lament their displacement by recordings, they recognize the inevitability and reality of progress. The MPTF has been a small gesture to the onslaught of technology on a human art form. Now, to add insult to injury, the Recording Industry wants to eliminate the MPTF, claiming that this program in no way contributes to the sale of its product, recorded music. Their complaint is that they get nothing in return. Granted, today’s Record Industry executives were not around when the MPTF was founded in “reparation” to the damage done by the technology that sucks the music out of the air and sells it to those who could not be there at its creation. The Recording Industry has lost sight, however so conveniently, of the reason that the Music Performance Trust Fund was established. The reverence of the “bottom line” has resulted in a blind spot for the principle of “giving back”.

For the Recording Industry to resent its contributions to bringing some measure of live music to a public who finds it a more rare pleasure with each passing year is to paint of itself a picture of hostility and greed. The Industry’s attempts to destroy the MPTF are removing the enjoyment of live music from the lives of multitudes of human beings whose exposure to these concerts is the only remaining opportunity to witness the creation of music. Some of their children have had no other opportunity. To so vehemently oppose the expenditure which creates this source of enjoyment is to attack the art which creates the product to be marketed. Just as today’s marketers of recorded products were not around when the rationale which created the MPTF existed, they will not be around at the time in the future when musicians have been forced into extinction and the Recording Industry executives will wonder what their predecessors were thinking about when they mortally wounded the goose that laid the golden egg.

Concerts in parks and malls are good things, as are those performed in schools and health care facilities. The Earth is enriched by these performances, paid for in part or whole by the MPTF. So many basic human enjoyments have been eradicated by one form of technology or another, resulting in one form of pollution or another. Enough so that the government intervenes and dictates conservation programs. The MPTF is a voluntary conservation program for which the Recording Industry is due a large measure of credit. It is sad that the Industry is willing to abandon this program and to regard the credit as negligible. It has lost sight of the sense of responsibility which guided it to contribute to the preservation of the art upon which it feeds. As the Recording Industry discovers more and more ways to electronically reproduce the sounds of music it seems to develop a proportionate disregard for the value of one of the basic human pleasures, Live Music! To threaten the MPTF is to contribute to the extinction of the very product that is being recorded. The sales of this product have created an industry so vast and short sighted that it fails to consider the negative effect that attacking the Music Performance Trust Fund will have on the development of those who will actually make the music. Musicians and audiences must be nurtured. Unless the Recording Industry recognizes its part in this responsibility it will, one day, find itself with technology capable of preserving the slightest musical nuance but no one with the ability to create it.

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