For 60 years, the Music Performance Fund, an unsung charity financed by a small fraction of record company sales, has paid the piper -- and just about every other kind of musician -- by helping to bankroll thousands of free concerts annually all over North America.
They have included Metropolitan Opera performances in New York's Central Park and a quartet led by a bassoonist who forged through icy waters in a small boat to play for Canadian villagers above the Arctic Circle.
Now, though, the popularity of music downloads and file-sharing via the Internet has eaten away at record company revenues. And as the industry has dwindled, so has the performance fund's ability to underwrite pro bono shows.
" 'Dwindled' is an easy way of saying it's gone to pot," said John Hall, the trustee who has managed the Music Performance Fund for most of the last 18 years.
At its peak in the early 1980s, Hall said, the fund got more than $20 million a year from record companies. Last year, the figure was $3.4 million. In 1984, the fund helped pay musicians' salaries for 55,000 free performances. Last year, there were 9,060. The organization's staff is down from 36 to eight.
Income from paid downloads, growing but still relatively small, is the music industry's hope for the future. But Web-generated sales are not in the agreement that governs the fund, negotiated between the American Federation of Musicians and the record companies.
Locally, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission has ended a partnership with the fund that dated back decades. Commission officials decided that the money, which comes with some bureaucratic strings and loss of hiring flexibility, had grown so scant that it no longer was worth the trouble.
The performance fund "is becoming a dinosaur," said Laura Zucker, executive director of the arts commission, a department of county government. She hopes the fund can "be creative" and find a way to regenerate itself for the Internet Age.
The arts commission's stake from the performance fund fell from $60,000 in 2000-01 to $32,000 in the current fiscal year, said Heather Rigby, the commission's public events coordinator. Next year, money from tax coffers will replace the fund's donation.
The city of Los Angeles' Cultural Affairs Department continues to tap the performance fund, but its annual grants have dropped from $52,500 to $30,500, forcing it to find other donors to make up the shortfall.
