Jesus Christ. They’re literally sending spies now. To a funeral no less. What a bunch of fucking ghouls. I’m just pirating shit out of principle now…
A business is a business. And as long as funeral homes charge money for their services, they don’t get exemption from anything.
The irony of claiming the funeral industry are the victims of money grabbing.
It works the same way in Germany. If you’re playing music in essentially any venue, even just on the radio, you pay a royalties fee. For places that do it everyday there is usually a flat yearly fee. At least here, a good chunk of that money does indeed fund other cultural endeavors.
At least here, a good chunk of that money does indeed fund other cultural endeavors.
Cultural endeavors is a very polite way to put it. A large chunk of it goes to only a handful of big performers in the music industry, the small ones who would actually need money get very little.
Actually GEMA takes a percentage from the big pop musicians to help fund the contemporary/avantgarde composers who would otherwise earn a lot less. There are plenty of things to complain about with GEMA but I think for the most part they do a lot to support smaller, more obscure genres. (I ran a publishing company for contemporary music in Germany for ten years, so I had a lot to do with GEMA)
You also pay fees to GEMA if you buy a writable CD or USB or other forms of data storage, because you could potentially use it to store music on it. It’s included in the price. This also affects devices with which you could transfer the data on the storage medium.
Don’t believe me?
Apparently it is not quite that simple.
https://www.event-locations.de/fileadmin/Auszuege-EVM/Auszug-GEMA-S-50-01-2016uTitel.pdf
How about the music industry pays those royalties to their musicians then?
The artists could have chosen not to sign their long-term rights away for short-term discounts on recording studio costs.
Makes sense. It’s not like funeral home offer their work for free, why should musicians?
