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Internet Radio Will Go Silent on June 26th
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jun 23, 2007 02:35 PM
from the up-against-the-wall dept.
from the up-against-the-wall dept.
Spamicles writes "Thousands of U.S. webcasters plan to turn off the music and go silent this Tuesday, June 26th, to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of this country's Internet radio industry. In March, the Copyright Royalty Board announced that it would raise royalties for Internet broadcasters, moving them from a per-song rate to a per-listener rate. The increase would be made retroactive to the beginning of 2006 and would double over the next five years. Internet radio sites would be charged per performance of a song. A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 "performances" for each song it plays."
Related Stories
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News: Small Webcasters Offered a Rate Break, Reject It 123 comments
Pontifex minimus writes "Music royalty collection group SoundExchange has offered an olive branch to small webcasters. They are willing to delay the exorbitant new rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board until 2010 for small webcasters in hopes that they can keep Congress from passing the Internet Radio Equality Act. Larger outfits, like Live365 and Pandora would not be affected and would have to pay the new rates. '"Although the rates revised by the CRB are fair and based on the value of music in the marketplace, there's a sense in the music community and in Congress that small webcasters need more time to develop their businesses," said John Simson, executive director of SoundExchange.' SaveNetRadio rejected SoundExchange's offer, saying that it 'throws large webcasters under the bus.'"
[+]
News: Internet Radio's "Last Stand" 316 comments
We've been discussing the plight of Internet radio for some time, as the Copyright Royalty Board imposed royalties that industry observers predicted would prove lethal to the nascent industry. We discussed Web radio's day of silence in protest, which won the industry a reprieve, and the futile efforts to find relief in Congress. Now it's looking as if the last act is indeed close. Death Metal Maniac sends along this Washington Post story with extensive quotes from Pandora CEO Tim Westergren, who said: "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money... We're funded by venture capital. They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken." The article estimates that XM Satellite Radio will pay "about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener." That's 70% of projected revenue for Pandora; smaller players estimate the hit at 100% to 300% of revenue.
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Solidarity! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Solidarity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
No Kidding (Score:5, Funny)
I'm all for it. Everybody should at least try having a real life for at least one 24-hour period anyway.
Parent
And in other news (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And in other news (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure those that listen to Internet radio will know ahead of time and are outraged by this decision. The rest of those that surf the Internet, those that make the laws, and just about everyone else (minus those that will see a financial gain from this ruling) don't know or care to know about what will happen to Internet radio.
And unfortunately it's not +1 Funny either.
Parent
newsflash (Score:4, Informative)
That is all.
Parent
Ob (Score:5, Funny)
What does this mean for... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What does this mean for... (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Soundexchange gets paid even for non-member music. The law says that if you can't pay them, you don't play the music.
Now, there is one thing though, Soundexchange is required to allow artists and radio stations to contract directly and individually and is required to track all of these individual contracts so that they don't bill for those recordings. As creative commons grows, we might have a bit of a weapon to fight back with, if on our end we set up something more-or-less automatic for creating those contracts, it may turn out that we can swamp Soundexchange with them if they haven't already automated their end of the deal. If we can, and Soundexchange fails to keep up their end of the law, since they are "deputized" to operate the law, their failure might be prosecutable as malfeasance (if you can convince the Department of Justice to care about corporations), especially if it can be shown that at some step of the way they intentionally refused a contract or knowingly billed for a contracted performance.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, they'll be silenced, so that you may return to your regularly scheduled monoculture of Britney Spears' current clone.
except for Last.fm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:except for Last.fm (Score:5, Interesting)
But of course, IANAL.
Parent
And as a paid subscriber to Pandora.com (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand the protest, and I sympathize. But I'm not a "free" subscriber. I've paid them for a service. Will they deliver it?
Perfect (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe instead of complaining to us, or to pandora, you should complain to Congress. Make the need for such outages unnecessary, and we'll stop promoting them.
Parent
Re:except for non-US radio (Score:3, Informative)
Radio stations like EBM Radio [ebm-radio.de] are purely unaffected mostly by this ruling. Of course they don't play much MPAA music as it is (otherwise why would we listen to them?)
Maybe some enterprising foreigner will setup a internet radio proxy service overseas beyond the reach of the MPAA?
Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)
The RIAA doesn't need another 500 "internet stations." This might be the biggest non-event since the breakup of the Smiths.
They call it "internet radio" (Score:2, Insightful)
In other News... (Score:2)
Here's a good link (Score:5, Informative)
Retroactive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, though, how in the heck can a price increase be retroactive?
Re:Retroactive? (Score:4, Informative)
There is a lot of bullshit and propaganda on both sides of this, don't take either side's word for anything.
Parent
Re:Retroactive? (Score:4, Insightful)
determined whenever enough palms had been greased, they had no way of knowing to
what extent people were going to fuck them over. So, once the term of the old rates
lapsed, what were they supposed to do? Shut down, because Amazing Kreskin^WAC
says they should have known they'd be screwed? Or keep on going, expecting things
not to be too different?
Compare, for instance, a renter and a landlord. If I have a lease with my landlord
to rent for $500 per month for a year and I make those payments everythings fine.
If at the end of the year I continue on as a tenant at will, and still pay $500 per
month, then everything's fine. The landlord cannot come back in three months and tell
me that the new rent is $750 per month and I owe him $750 in back rent; regardless
of whether or not he told me when the lease lapsed that he'd be raising the rent but
hadn't decided how hard he wanted to screw me yet.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Retroactive? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Retroactive? (Score:5, Informative)
The rates set by the royalty board is incredibly high and completely unfair. I agree I'm bias on the issue, but if the current rates are upheld, we would be required to pay $900,000/year just in royalties.
The current rates, if applied to traditional radio, would require a station like KROQ in Los Angeles to pay $1.4 billion/year just in royalties. Last year, they mad $67 million in revenue. If one of the most successful traditional radio station cannot afford these royalties, how can any internet radio station that still developing a revenue base be able to?
http://www.idobi.com/news/?p=25408 [idobi.com]
Parent
Re:Retroactive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simply not possible for "internet radio" to die at this point. Only for the US to further drive its own companies into irrelevance.
I wrote both my state sentators... (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for writing to me regarding proposed changes to the assessment of royalty fees that Internet radio broadcasters pay to musicians and record labels. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.
As you probably know, the federal Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has released its plan for charging online radio broadcasters for royalties. The Internet Radio Equality act of 2007 (S.1353), which was recently introduced in the Senate, would nullify the CRB's proposal and prevent the new royalties assessment plan from taking effect.
S.1353 is currently being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Please be assured that I will take your comments under advisement, should this legislation come before the full Senate.
Again, thank you for writing to me. Please keep in touch with me about this and any other issue of concern to you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Some useful sites. USE THEM! (Score:5, Informative)
Here are some useful sites where you can find out what you can do. If nothing else, contact your congressional representatives and tell them to save internet radio by sponsoring the Internet Radio Equality Act.
http://www.savenetradio.org/ [savenetradio.org]
http://www.savenetradio.org/act_now/index.html [savenetradio.org]
http://www3.capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/callaler
As far as Utah goes... (Score:4, Informative)
This is Just a Taste of What is to Come (Score:5, Insightful)
Obigatory Ogg Vorbis request (Score:3, Funny)
They should really be using Ogg Vorbis, because it's VBR nature means it encodes silence just that much better than MP3 or AAC ;-)
SHH to Canada... (Score:5, Funny)
WCPE Classical Station getting hit. (Score:3, Informative)
http://theclassicalstation.org/save_our_streams.s
Interesting about who has said things about this (Score:5, Interesting)
I do listen to a lot of Online Radio, primarily KTRS 550, and KMOX out of my home town of St. louis at work. There are some afternoon shows I like to listen too and now since I live out both of their radio range (I can get KMOX sometimes at night, but now that the Cards games have moved...)
Still I listen to more podcasts of shows that aren't in my market like the Tony Kornheiser show and then some of the ESPN shows like PTI.
I had my own radio show on the college radio back in the day, and I remember we were charged by the song, not the number of listeners, but as a low power system, I'm not sure how all those rates are calculated anymore. If that is still the case, this just seems like a way to cut competition for terrestrial radio stations.
The music industry is ass backwards. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh they can kiss my ass (Score:4, Informative)
1. I myself have bought albums after hearing certain artists' songs on other net radio stations -- music I would never, ever, ever have heard otherwise except perhaps in the drunken haze of a goth club.
2. Several independent artists have sent me singles and even entire albums and other promo kits, encouraging me to put them in rotation. One synthpop artist [jamesdstark.com] wrote:
And another [redflag.org] said, after sending me some tracks and I liked them but mentioned I'd never heard of this group before:
This has happened dozens of times. It's good for the artists who are trying to get noticed; it's good for the audience who gets to discover new music; it's good for the broadcaster cause it's just fun. I get permission from many of the labels or artists to play their stuff, and when I don't, well, it's a freaking 96k broadcast that can't be copied without some technical know-how (certainly much more difficult than jamming a tape into your radio and hitting "record"). Exactly who is being harmed here?
You know, there ain't no Benjamens in the net broadcasting trade. We do this for fun and the love of the music. The RIAA's outmoded and antiquated business models, and their continued attempts to strangle the life out of emergent technologies, is absolutely appalling. I'll continue to broadcast from my host in Germany and here's a big screw you to the suits. I don't make a single cent off my broadcast, and I don't play the kind of music that would come close to competing with the mass-appeal fare on the normal airwaves. You'll never get a dime from me.
This law will outsource our radio... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in effect, this law will only serve to outsource these stations to other countries -- places where the RIAA can't extract any royalties at all. Brilliant, RIAA, brilliant...
Ridiculousness with an easy solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Use compressed music as advertisement.
Artists should be making most of their money off of live performances.
Sell CDs for a reasonable price (this is the real problem, RIAA. Why are you too greedy to see this?). $10 instead of $20. I *might* pay $15, if it is an artist I really dig and there are a lot of good songs on the CD. For older music, sell it for $5-$8 per CD. Sell MP3 CDs with 3-10 albums on them in compressed format for $20 (or the equivalent online, whatever).
Why is this so difficult? People don't pay for the shit because it's ridiculously over-priced. I definitely won't pay for compressed music, and buy most stuff used these days, or from local bands themselves at CD release parties ($5 a CD).
Compressed music == advertisement for the real product. If your product isn't worth paying for, then maybe you should fix THAT problem. For stuff I like and want to add to my collection, I much prefer having the uncompressed 'master' to encode and catalog as I see fit. (on that note, stop with the bullshit DRM crap, Mmmkay?).
Just some of my thoughts on the subject.
Re:RIAA Wins and Loses at the same time (Score:5, Insightful)
Distribution Control.
Parent
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
if it's licensed by the FCC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:does this affect SIRI/XM streaming (Score:5, Informative)
The short answer is "no." In fact, internet radio stations would much rather have it the other way around: they want to pay what satellite radio pays. Right now, they're paying twice the satellite rate, and the new increases would push internet radio rates astronomically higher, retroactive to January 1, 2006.
In effect, the RIAA (through the Copyright Royalty Board) is trying to kill internet radio.
Parent
Re:What can I do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent