Editorial: The new fitness mantra - push pay

The record industry wants a lot more money from fitness clubs and aerobics classes to help make up for the big drop in sales resulting from the illegal downloading of music. Photo / Kenny Rodger

Opinion

Everyone loves a bargain. There's nothing so satisfying as paying much less than something is actually worth to you. Conversely, there's nothing quite so galling as seeing the price suddenly and massively hiked.

So it's not hard to understand why the nation's gym bunnies are sweating into their lycra at the prospect of a 4000 per cent increase in the copyright charges for the music they play at aerobics lessons and other fitness classes.

The Phonographic Performances Company of Australia (PPCA) is demanding big increases in fees across the Tasman and the folk in the fitness industry say the local equivalent, Phonographic Performances NZ (PPNZ), is certain to follow suit.

They're very probably right, although PPNZ is playing its cards close to its chest for now. But the distraught Fitness New Zealand chief executive Richard Beddie has yet to explain why his organisation's 275 constituent fitness clubs shouldn't fork out.

According to his own figures, the gyms currently pay small change - about $1 per booming, sweaty session. The new prices represent a 40-fold increase, which is a stiff rise all right. But that would add $4.50 to a monthly membership of around $90: that's 5 per cent, which is not exactly the economic apocalypse. Beddie's handwringing predictions that operators will go to the wall seems more than a little alarmist.

The fact is that music is an essential element of gyms' fitness routines and they've been undercharged for it for too long. The commercial world has always undervalued artists' work - not for nothing is something cheap described as "going for a song" - and there are very few musicians who would earn as much as the proprietor of a modest suburban gym.

This same Beddie was quoted in these pages in November, rejoicing that the fitness industry is "recession-proof" and describing getting fit as "cheap entertainment". Now, if it's to get (very slightly) more expensive, it will just be because the gyms aren't getting the soundtrack for next to nothing. Fair enough. If they don't like it, they could always invent silent aerobics.