Pandora, Yahoo music and many others are participating except for CBS-owned Last.fm [techcrunch.com]

If you want to find your local congress critter, and ping them on the subject, Go here [capwiz.com]. This link takes you to a nice little cgi app that takes your zip code, and gives you the phone numbers for your house and senate rep's, along with a short script of talking points. If the Internet Radio Equality Act, (S. 1353 in the senate, and H.R. 2060 in the house) can get some sponsors, and get passed, we're all in much better shape.

You want a politician to respond to you? Snail mail is *still* the best way. Take ideas from a template if you must, but make most of the stuff, if not all of it up yourself. Be concise, but be sure and make your point. Bitching about a situation is obviously easier, but I got a reply back from Senator Boxer about a week ago (with the original letter sent in late May), which stated the following:


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.

The original rates were set for a five year period. After the five year period was up, new rates still had not been determined, so the old ones were used in the interim. These are the new rates, which take effect beginning when the previous five year period ended. Basically everyone paying the old rates knew full well that they were going to go up and be "retroactive", it is not something that was just sprung on them.

There is a lot of bullshit and propaganda on both sides of this, don't take either side's word for anything.

Because the rates are set by the government. And when the old rates ran out, everyone agreed to keep using them and to pay the new rates retroactively once they negotiated new ones. It took them a year and a half of arguing over the new rates to achieve a settlement, so the backlog built up quite a lot.

Since, per their own contracts, the Live365's of the world pay royalties on behalf of all the little guys that are their customers, and since Live365 (etc) didn't raise their billing rates, they're now in the hole for a lot of money.

Of course they cast it as evil corporations oppressing the little guy to gain support.

This current plan to hike royalty rates would be apocalyptic for internet radio. Its retroactive effect alone (back to January 1, 2006) would bankrupt all but the huge players.

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/callalert /index.tt?alertid=9731806 [capwiz.com]

I now know who cares and who doesn't. I got a letter back within about a week from Jim Matheson, our Representative, who seemed very adamant about how wrong this proposed legislation is. He even went on in detail about why he wanted internet radio to stay the way is is (or become free, even). Bob Bennett didn't respond. Orrin Hatch, who is himself a recording artist (in a loose usage of the term), seemed to be sidestepping the issue in the letter he sent back. It was almost as though he agreed with the rate hikes. How someone who gets paid to make music can support the RIAA is beyond me. Though I guess Roarin' Orrin's reply didn't really surprise me, I guess there are things in life you never get used to.

Yeah, but why does this apply to Internet radio and not broadcast radio? The principle you described is the model for broadcast radio, yet broadcast radio does not pay this way. This is about the record industry eliminating internet radio. The record industry controls what is played over broadcast radio, there are too many internet radio stations for them to get that kind of control over. The other problem is that the amount of the pay-per-listener fee exceeds what advertisers are willing to pay per listener.

The problem with Government is that they forgot they were trying to legislate an international network.

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?

I run idobi Radio. We're an alternative/rock station that's doing fairly well, in terms of popularity.

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]

Here's a letter from the gen manager at WCPE:

http://theclassicalstation.org/save_our_streams.sh tml [theclassicalstation.org]

does this royalty regime apply to the streams from XM and Sirius?

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.

Fax it - snail mail is held for weeks for terrorism checks. Fax the D.C. office and the local office(s).

As the operator of a synthpop and darkwave internet radio station [mirrorshades.org] (plug!) myself, my response is "kiss my ass". Like most other stations, I broadcast things that aren't ever going to be heard on conventional radio, giving (relatively) niche or obscure artists that much more free exposure. I know this works for two reasons:

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:

Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is the mail.

And another [redflag.org] said, after sending me some tracks and I liked them but mentioned I'd never heard of this group before:

Yeah, that is what we are experiencing with Red Flag. The darkwave scene
just loves the music but we need to really get the message out there.

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.

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.

That's intention of projects like the Antenna Alliance [antalliance.org], trying to make it easier for artists to release their works on CC licenses. At the same time it makes their music freely available directly through the website. So it gives the artist more exposure, it makes more content accessible to the listener, and (most importantly) makes CC licenses a more widely accepted way to release music.

On a somewhat related note, it's kind of ironic that this comes on the heels of the Local Community Radio Act of 2007 [prometheusradio.org] - a bill that will free the airwaves somewhat of corporate control and make it a lot easier for low-power FM radio stations to gain broadcasting licenses. For more info on this, go to the Prometheus Radio Project [prometheusradio.org].

We're certainly living in an exciting and frightening time for radio.

You know, I get almost-identical form letters whenever I email my senators.

USA != Internet.

That is all.