Amusing back and forth between radio stations and record companies.

When a song is played on the radio, the station pays a fee to the composer/author of the song via organisations such as APRA.

They don't pay any money to the record company or the artist who played the song (unless of course they're the composer/author).

So if you cover a song (or perform a song that a professional hitmaker wrote) that is released by a major record company, the only person who gets any money for a radio play is the hitmaker.

You'd wonder why if this were the case that record companies are still happy to send, for free, thousands of CDs to radio stations in the hope they'll be played. In fact, they often pay the radio station (unofficially) to play their songs.

But, the record companies are asking that this all be changed, and ask that the radio stations pay a fee to the label and actual artist performing the songs too, arguing that they deserve to be compensated.

The radio stations have agreed, but countered with a request that artist's recording contracts be investigated, asking how much an artist gets for performing a song. As the radio stations are effectively being asked to pay "someone" for the "performance" of putting a song on the radio, they want to know where it goes.

If any of this goes anywhere we'll start to see some very interesting numbers on the table.