Dispute Heats Up Over Proposed New Fees for Playing Songs on the Radio

For more than 70 years, royalty payments for air time have flowed to the songwriters and music publishers but not to the musicians or record companies. Now there is a renewed drive to revisit that arrangement, and in recent weeks the volume of the discussion has increased several decibels.

For the radio industry, that has meant taking the battle to a place it knows: the airwaves. Over a recent 10-day period, a 60-second advertisement distributed by the National Association of Broadcasters was broadcast free almost 35,000 times on radio stations across the country, according to Media Monitors, which tracks radio advertisements.

In response, the MusicFirst Coalition, a group that includes the record companies and hundreds of artists, began an ad campaign of its own, though on a much smaller scale. A print ad, which ran in Roll Call, a Washington newspaper popular on Capitol Hill, featured a pig with an antenna for a tail and its head buried in a pail labeled "Bailout Funds." A radio spot ran on a local Washington station.