indie windfall!

watchout!

check this out, from an article in the observer today…

The world’s largest independent record labels hope to secure a windfall for their artists by creating a new licensing agency that will make it easier to strike content deals with media groups.

Hundreds of labels from more than a dozen countries, representing nearly a third of the global music market, unveiled the organisation, called Merlin, in Cannes yesterday.

Billed as a one-stop licensing shop, It will allow indie labels to reach agreements with websites like MySpace and YouTube, which make music available to their users, by providing a template that can be used as a basis for deals. Record companies will sell their artists’ material to the sites, probably in return for a small payment for each play.

More info on Merlin and it’s goals was included in the Billboard article, here.

Merlin is a sister organization to WIN, the global indies’ trade body which launched at Midem 2006. It has been incubated by WIN as its “first major initiative,” AIM CEO Alison Wenham commented at Midem today.

“We intend to achieve parity for copyright payment,” she said. “There is currently a two-tiered system, which discriminates against indies. Merlin is a response to that.”

Charles Caldas, former CEO of independent Australian distribution company Shock Entertainment Group, becomes Merlin’s CEO.

While independent labels today represent more than 70% of the annual music releases worldwide, Caldas argues, many small independents do not have the same clout as the major when negotiating to have their repertoire used on international digital services.

Moreover, international online operations, such as MySpace have the laborious task of approaching thousands of independents on a market-by-market basis to acquire licensed music.

“Services seeking to license a broad range of repertoire across the independent sector have in the past faced a complex, frustrating and laborious task, potentially involving the negotiations of thousands of contracts directly with labels and their distributors and aggregators in a range of territories around the globe,” Caldas tells Billboard.biz.

So that’s an interesting twist. In it i recognize some of the same tricky principles that come up in what we try to do with indyish. The centralizing of independence is an interesting conflict of interests to try and negotiate. In the case of merlin it may well provide a clarity of communication that will be a righting of scales in the music world, which could have great cascading effects. As international, independent musicians gain new power and opportunity to communicate with their new capital, there are bound to be secondary implications. They might help with other struggles for prosperous and peaceful independence. They definitely might be able to pay the rent a bit more often and therefore have time to be more involved in community-building then they are. I think it could make artist networks like Indyish all the more interesting. But we’ll see, eh?