The Carter Family found this out when they tried to release songbooks of their legendary recordings, only to find out they’d signed over exclusive rights to producer Ralph Peer; over nearly a century the music industry’s exploitation of artists has been a national disgrace. Somehow this sad fact has escaped notice by the trade association of our broadcast industry, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

That is, until now.

The NAB has had a sudden attack of moral conscience, occasioned by the record labels trying to shake them down to start paying the performer of a work as well as the songwriter. They’re now suddenly standing up for the poor downtrodden artist. Until stations began playing records in the 50s, most music on the radio was performed live, by artists who were paid by the stations.

When commercial records took over at the rise of “disk jockey” shows, the musicians unions forced stations to hire “record turners,” but those have now disappeared as well, and they didn’t represent the recording artist, they represented the legacy musicians who were fired because they were no longer needed.

Through the rise of internet and satellite radio, the NAB stood by mute as those new media agreed to pay performance fees, often to the record companies who had usurped the performers’ rights through work for hire contracts. So the NAB’s sudden concern rings a little hollow, but not as hollow as their attempt to misrepresent performance fees as a “tax.” Paying a performer for a song’s performance on the radio is no more a “performance tax” than paying a station to run commercials is a “marketing tax.”

The NAB is too late. The downtrodden performers have already found a way out of the mess through owning their own labels and often distributing their own music. This means that the NAB is only fighting the RIAA for the older product. Performance fees for the new product will likely go right to the performer.

But the worst thing the NAB has done with this ruse, is to prove that it will say anything to make money. That’s the wrong thing for a trade association to do when it represents the companies who claim they should be trusted to hold public licenses to use the public airwaves to bring us news and “official information.”

And you also heard Aaron Copland. A lot of Copland, from The Lincoln Portrait which accompanied Hanks’ reading, to strains of Simple Gifts,  one of the themes blended by John Williams for his arrangement for Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, also used by Copland for his Appalachian Suite, to Fanfare for the Common Man. Our list of American composers of ceremonial music is short, and runs the range of styles from John Philip Sousa to Mr. Williams. But the dean is Aaron Copland whose pioneering styles can still be heard in modern film composers like James Newton Howard.

I couldn’t help thinking how proud Aaron Copland would have been; a proud Socialist during the 30s FDR administration. A man who loved his country not in the “love it or leave it” frame, but “love it and improve it.”  He wrote the soundtrack for monumental progress that would happen long after his death.

Perhaps Copland and Lincoln were both looking down at us in our time of great progress and great peril. Thinking of that, I started experimenting with Copland and Copland-like themes as an arranging project, which I’ve posted here. The middle portion is real Copland, performed at the Obama Lincoln celebration and narrated live by Tom Hanks. These are real instruments playing real Copland music in a fair-use sized chunk. The surrounding music, accompanying Mr. Obama, are my composition and orchestration realized by the East-West Symphony Orchestra sample set being driven by Sonar 7 Producer.

Most browsers should play the files below by clicking the links. Don’t attempt the lossless WMA without a fast connection.

President’s Day Copland Tribute – mp3

President’s Day Copland Tribute – wma (lossless 18meg)

President’s Day Copland tribute – wma (compressed 1.8 meg)

But then again, I’m trying to find a way to frustrate it. I’m pretty eclectic in my audio taste, and in 50-something years I’ve picked up a lot of strange knowledge, and I can’t resist trying to tweek Pandora with it. Its a little like entering Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park or Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah at “What do the lyrics mean” websites.

So far, Pandora’s responded admirably. At Pandora, one can create stations based on an artist, or a song, or both. This information drives a big inference engine that suggests a whole range of songs. My first attempt was Spike Jones. Voila! Spike Jones radio, which proceeded to play Spike Jones selections I’ve not yet heard, and offer up other off-center performances. Ray Stevens, Sheb Wooley, Ben Colder (who looks remarkably like Mr. Wooley), and a host of great novelty one-hit wonders.

Tom Leherer? Absolutely. Which gravitated to Dr. Demento and all his craziness. Pico & Sepulveda still streams in my head. OK. how about dead genres. Let’s try Milton Brown. “And his Musical Brownies?” queries the Pandorabot. Curses. Foiled again.

Nickodell Matchbook

Along the way, I learned and appreciated, and about that time my musical juggernaut was interrupted by a bulletin from Don Barrett at LAradio.com that Bill Drake had gone to that great music library in the sky, and my mind went to the Nickodell, now a parking lot on the Paramount Lot, where the Boss Jocks of KHJ drank away many happy hours. Background music?

So I started creating a station using the tools I’d discovered playing with the box (should that be a jar) that is Pandora, and soon, I had Last Round at Ciro’s. What might have been heard at the Nickodell in its heyday. Elegant music of the 50s and 60s with a twist of nostalgia. I was doing in minutes what used to take days even months; tweaking a radio format without even the need of a record library. Did Drake ever know this existed?

Before the Internet, there were specialized and scarce jobs that required multidisciplinary understanding, like the music director or program director of radio stations that were unapproachable by the masses. Today anybody with a little knowledge and a lot of passion can do them thanks to specialized websites like Pandora and last.fm.

And by the way, I finally beat Pandora at its own game. The Pasadena Roof Orchestra

“We’re always looking for great music to include, so we’ll check it out” said the Pandora-bot, its eyes downward. “Is there something else you’d like to listen to?”

[And thanks to Pete Handleman for the light. Bartender, another one for Mr. Morgan, Mr. Steele and Mr. Drake, on me.]

A few months ago, deep in the comments section of a diary about Air America on DailyKos (that lefty blog the right loves to hate) a poster mentioned that she’d received an ARB diary. She was going to make sure that all the liberal talk shows she listens to got the full credit they deserve. Problem was: she didn’t listen to any of them on the radio.

She listened to them as podcasts. As the discussion proceeded, she listed all the reasons that podcasts were so much better than listening on the radio. It was probably beyond her why she wasn’t really helping Air America by filling out the diary as if she listened. When even the folks who like audio-only programming move on from radio to other distribution media, its the death knell.

Once the home of Palm Beach's WEAT AM & FM

Radio stayed alive the way the telegram and the landline analog telephone stayed alive for so long; bandwidth was expensive. Today we send emoticons back and forth on chat channels that take more bandwidth than a telegram took just 50 years ago.

Radio always existed because there wasn’t a more information-rich medium to fill its shoes, from the days it repurposed vaudeville, through the days it played niche music, to the days the public’s ears became sophisticated enough to tell AM was inferior, and it was relegated to the bellicose screeching of the right wing blowhards, religion, and foreign language.

Who left talk radio first? The progressives. Who is leaving music radio? The kids. Sure, some of it is that they didn’t grow up with it. But the rest is that what they grew up understanding (mp3 players and texting cell phones) are far more interesting because they’re interactive.

One hundred years ago, instantaneous communication was so stunning that a transmitter and receiver in a room together “with no connection between them save the ether” could cause an audience to gasp. Today, there’s a cellphone in everybody’s pocket.

I know many of us love radio, usually because we were in it or it was a big part of our lives when our world was young, but the medium was lucky enough to have two golden ages. We’re in the throes of a media technological revolution that is as dramatic as the early demonstrations of radio was to the horse-drawn generation. The telegraph is dead, newspapers and radio aren’t far behind.

So, I’d say radio isn’t at fault for its ills, nor is it the economy. Its the public that, just as they finally grasped that FM was better–over RCA’s powerful objections–has finally grasped that radio isn’t the best place to go for anything anymore.

Could radio have kept itself alive longer? Probably. But its like any dying industry. Do you stop pouring the money into it, and take the profits until they dry up, or do you try and prop it up by massive infusions of cash even when you know there’s a fundamental flaw in the technology. I think radio lived a long and rich life, and we ought to prepare ourselves to give it the final tribute it deserves.