That's where you come in

They are what they eat

Eric Wolff's story about pet nutrition [The Front Lines," May 16] warns against making homemade food for pets as if people are idiots and don't know they need to buy a book where the author has done his or her homework and determined the proper nutritional requirements.

Three books I use that provide recipes for homemade natural food and, of course, are nutritionally sound recipes-Dr. Pitcairn's New Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats, The New Natural Cat and Reigning Cats & Dogs are ones that I know are widely accepted.

OK, it's true, onions are bad, and the nutritionist at Whole Foods should not have written her own recipes. But people need to realize that the food they buy at the store or even the vet's office is not high-quality food. Most of it has by-products, almost all the choices are not organic, and they are highly processed. So it is a no-brainer that it's in my pet's best interest for me to buy a book and switch them over to real food so that I am not going to the vet's office constantly once they pass the age of 10, which is what I am doing now, since my cats were raised on supposedly high-quality Nutro and Pro Plan.

Natelle Bracken,
North Park

67 years ago...

I was fascinated by Edwin Decker's "Sordid Tales" column, "Royalties and radio," in your May 30 issue, mainly because-though Decker may be unaware of it-something very much like his scenario has already taken place in the history of the American music business.

The year was 1940, and then, as now, the radio industry was fighting over the level of royalties it would pay to broadcast songs. Only, the villain wasn't the recording industry; it was the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP), a trade association whose entire purpose was (and is) to collect royalties from public performances, recordings and broadcasts of songs and distribute them to their writers and publishers.

In addition to having a reputation for being hard-nosed in its business tactics and not always scrupulous in rewarding the actual creators of these songs, as opposed to the companies that published and marketed them (sound familiar?), ASCAP was also openly racist. Until Duke Ellington's first manager and publisher, Irving Mills, filed an appeal to admit Ellington-and got the support of ASCAP's biggest moneymaker, Irving Berlin-African-American songwriters were simply not allowed to join ASCAP and therefore could not collect royalties beyond what their publishers paid them voluntarily. (This explains why black composer-bandleader Jelly Roll Morton died in penury and ill health in 1941, even though his song "King Porter Stomp" had been Benny Goodman's star-making record and was one of the standards of the swing era.)

When ASCAP demanded a major increase in royalty payments from radio stations in 1940, negotiations broke down and the radio industry did exactly what Decker suggests they do now if the RIAA's proposal for broadcast royalties goes into effect. They started their own association of songwriters and publishers, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), and used music exclusively from BMI's writers and publishers. Since ASCAP had locked up most of the talent in the most popular musical genres of the time-Tin Pan Alley ballads, Broadway show tunes and commercial swing-BMI concentrated on genres ASCAP had ignored, including white country-and-western and black rhythm-and-blues.

As a result, those kinds of music got far more exposure on radio than they had before, new audiences were exposed to them, they became much more popular and eventually they fused to form rock 'n' roll, followed by soul music and rap. In other words, virtually all the kinds of music CityBeat writes about descend from the artists who won their first mass audiences thanks to ASCAP's obstinacy towards the radio industry and the resulting formation of BMI. Is it too much to hope for that that history repeats and RIAA's overreaching on the radio royalty issue brings currently underground genres to the ears of millions of people who'd like them if only they had a chance to hear them?

Mark Gabrish Conlan,
North Park

RIAA nefariousness

I was the program director for an Internet radio station here in San Diego, which is no longer in existence, thanks in part to the RIAA and DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Here is some historical perspective to add to Ed Decker's excellent (as usual!) column ["Sordid Tales," May 30].
At the start of broadcasting, more than 50 years ago, the music business was still a growth industry. Record manufacturing wasn't an industry; the field was wide open to anyone with a microphone and record lathe. (Before 1933, there was no audio tape, either; phonograph records were cut directly from a performance.) Records were recorded at different speeds and were cut with both horizontal and vertical modulation. It was a real mess.
The Recording Industry Association of America was established to create technical standards for the recording industry. But, since there was still plenty of competition, they all recognized the promotional function of airplay. Terrestrial broadcast stations were not subjected to such onerous fees. The RIAA developed 78 RPM and made sure that all recording machines (and players) revolved at the same speed. Over the years, the RIAA evolved into the industry's trade organization.
Now, the recording industry is dominated by five or six multinational conglomerates, and the RIAA has evolved into their mouthpiece.
Remember DAT (digital audiotape)? The RIAA made sure consumers had a hard time remembering such technological advances. Under its current administration, it has now decided that it is also a collector of royalties on behalf of the American record industry.
This clearly is a role that was never intended for this organization. First of all, there already is both ASCAP and BMI. And, even as recently as the 1950s and '60s, composers and musicians have been blatantly abused and cheated of their royalties by many less-than-scrupulous record companies. Now, the RIAA wants us to believe that they are the representatives of those artists. What gall!
Death to the RIAA!

Michael-Leonard Creditor,
Clairemont

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