Recording Industry Needs More Payment Transparency, PK Says

Public Knowledge Vice President-Legal Affairs Sherwin Siy agrees with SoundExchange board member David Byrne that the recording industry continues to lack transparency, he said. “In the end, no one knows where all the money goes,” Siy said in a blog post Friday. Byrne raised concerns about transparency issues in the recording industry in an Aug. 2 New York Times opinion article. Individual artists and companies may disclose some information, but “pretty much none of these accounts give their numbers in equivalent values,” Siy said. “You’ll hear about a per-play value here, an aggregate value there, an average in one place, the pennies or millions of outliers in another.” Transparency has been “lacking” in the recording industry because there are incentives not to disclose payment information since sometimes “transparency could make someone look bad, revealing disparate payments that could upset business partners,” Siy said. “Other reasons likely include the perception that the data could be monetized somehow, and that others should be paying for that. And some parties might simply balk at the cost of gathering data they’ve never had to gather before." RIAA had no immediate comment Tuesday.