NQC’s Webcast, Two Possible Solutions

by | Nov 15, 2019 | Commentary & Observations, Music Business, Music Tech

Yesterday, I shared thoughts[1] about the National Quartet Convention’s announcement regarding the cancellation of their online webcast starting in 2020.

Today, I wanted to mention a couple of possible ways it could continue. I hope the various parties involved will at least consider these options.

  1. It is a publisher company’s DUTY to the songwriters they represent to look for every way possible to collect more royalties. Therefore, the major Southern Gospel publishers could proactively meet, discuss, and then present a proposal to NQC.

    Basically, they’d just need to agree on what specific percentage of each webcast sale should be put into a pool to pay songwriters. Then, it’s simply a matter of tallying up the list of songs that were sung and divvying up the cash accordingly; not at all unlike the job record labels are supposed to be doing every month when the pay out to publishers. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

    Most of the larger publishing companies are divisions of the biggest record labels. Daywind, Crossroads (Horizon/Sonlite), Gaither Music Group, and StowTown could and should be the ones who meet and get the ball rolling to make this happen.

    Yes, the price of the webcast would necessarily go up, but I believe most fans who have grown to love the webcast would gladly pay a little more if the other option is that it goes entirely away.
  2. Another option would be for NQC to sell access to a private YouTube links. This would not work for live streaming via YouTube’s standard terms, but it would certainly work to allow people to watch the footage after the fact.

    Any video uploaded to YouTube can be set to “private,” then only customers who purchase access to the footage (who must also have registered YouTube accounts) can access it. The advantage of this arrangement is it’s YouTube’s job to pay the song publishers for however many times a video is streamed.

    Of course, with it not being “live,” I expect less fans would buy it, but perhaps if footage went up the following day, they wouldn’t lose too many viewers.

    Obviously, having publishers agree on a price is better as described above would be preferred, but the YouTube option is better than nothing.
Endnotes:
  1. shared thoughts: http://blog.musicscribe.com/2019/11/nqc-webcast-and-the-reality-of-copyright-law/

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archives

Categories

David Bruce Murray

David Bruce Murray

David Bruce Murray is a church music director in Ellenboro, NC. He is the author of Murray's Encyclopedia Of Southern Gospel Music and the owner of both SGHistory.com and MusicScribe.com.

1 Comment

  1. Aaron Swain

    The YouTube solution sounds like it would be the most cost-effective solution on the consumer end. With as many people that complained about the price increase for the webcast (even though consumers got at least one, if not two, years of archives to enjoy) perhaps the YouTube links would be more to their liking. Of course, we have no way of knowing unless they actually implemented it.

    Reply

Tell us what you think!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Posts