RIAA Allegedly Greedy, Recording Artists Stunned

- Image: CD Cover of Money in the Mail, The Musician's Dream

The RIAA is always quick to point out that their lawsuits against the P2P companies and more recently against thousands of individuals is for the protection of the artists they represent. So surely, the artists are seeing their share of the hundreds of millions of dollars the RIAA has won in settlements, right? Wrong. According to a contingent of prominent artist managers, little to none of that money has trickled down to their clients, and they are now considering legal action against the major labels.

John Branca, a lawyer who has worked for The Rolling Stones, Don Henley, and Korn, was quoted in the New York Post as saying "Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for. Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don't get paid soon."
The record labels claim that corporate bosses are "still deciding" on how best to split the money, and that in many cases, after the labels recouped their legal expenses, there wasn't much left to pass along to the artists.

In a related story, Tanya Anderson is back again, with an amended legal complaint that the RIAA cannot have dismissed as they did her previous complaint. The new complaint could force the RIAA to disclose how much they pay their lawyers, where they come up with the numbers for those "early settlement" fees, how they decide who to sue and who not to sue, and where the settlement money is actually going.