In today's Sydney Morning Herald there were two stories about music in live venues.

The first story was in the main body of the paper on page 3 and titled "Music off the menu as licensing row heats up".

The second story was in the Good Living magazine section and subtitled "A suitable soundtrack can make a difference to diner behaviour".

What was remarkable was that the two articles told two entirely different stories about music in restaurants. The first was about the PPCA (that is the record companies) and their move to get more money from restaurants.... because they can. The second was about how APRA (that is the songwriters and publishers) have done research on how different kinds of music can help restauranteurs motivate diners to either linger longer and pick up a dessert and coffee or eat faster and turn the table over to the next punter.

There may be a lot of debate about whether restaurants and other venues should have to pay or not. I think that is a furphy. Of course they are going to have to pay for playing music. However, what they should be doing is asking the organizations that are standing over them looking for their piece of the action to show that they are indeed paying the appropriate amount of money collected to the correct recipient.

The reason that I say this is that it is all too easy for these organizations to just let all this money that they are collecting go into the big black box for divvying up between the record companies with very little going to the relevant performers.

Let's face it - how often have you been to a restaurant that plays edgy pop records while you are having dinner? Surely more likely that they play soft jazz and ambient new age stuff? But the likelyhood is that if they use the normal "follow the dollar" principle of royalty accounting, the money they get from all these venues will just go to the American rappers and rock and rollers instead of going to the obscure world music and classical artists that it should get to.

If the PPCA are successful in getting up their plan to turn a $69 annual fee into a $5500 fee per the article linked to above and there are say 10,000 restaurants in this country (I would think that there are more) that would mean that a current revenue line of $690,000 would rise to a staggering 550,000,000!

This is what the record companies are looking to get for Christmas this year.

Frankly you should give a damn too. Because regardless of how you may feel about record companies, ultimately if they are successful in getting this fee hike in place, it will trickle down into increased prices at the restaurant. And that means that you pay.

Now because of the way that most record companies have artist contracts written the probability is that well over 50% of this revenue line will just stick to the record companies balance sheets and not go to the artists.

And more importantly, most of the indie artists, classical artists and jazz and new age etc artists won't see a penny.

This is the problem: The record companies think that having some kind of moral right enables them to just grab the money and run.

Of course they may use those windfall profits to fund chasing after a bunch of P2P downloaders who are sharing crappy low bit rate files seeded into the network by people who actually work for the record companies themselves as part of their promotional activity (that also allows plausible deniability about the knowledge that the record companies are sharing the files on the P2P networks themselves).

Its a crazy world. But it will only be crazier if record companies get to collect more money.

That is my rant for the day!