As you may know, the US is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t respect artists, musicians and vocalists enough to pay them when their songs are played on the radio.  That’s right, when you hear “Gimmie Shelter” on the radio, Jagger and Richards get paid for the song but Merry Clayton does not.  Even on her own version of the song.

And when you hear “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” performed by Aretha Franklin, the songwriter Otis Redding gets paid a royalty, but Aretha does not.  (And neither do the players or background singers).

This sucks.

If you haven’t heard about it, there is a spontaneous petition that Blake Morgan put up at irespectmusic.org that Blake discusses in his MTP interview to tell the U.S. Congress that you respect music (#irespectmusic) and want our artists to be paid for radio airplay.