Internet Radio Will Go Silent on June 26th 250
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."
Solidarity! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Solidarity! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think it'd be more effective to do follow Madonna's example from a few years back. Instead of going silent, they could spoken word broadcasts to summarize the problem and outline actions that citizens could take.
In fact, I'd like to see news organizations do the same. Of course, I'd also like to see pigs fly. Independent operators are looking at the destruct
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.
And in other news (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
newsflash (Score:4, Informative)
That is all.
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.
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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 give
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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.
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.
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?
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I guess I shouldn't even listen to them, though, for that day and just bring some CDs to work.
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.
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"Hang the DJ"!
They call it "internet radio" (Score:2, Insightful)
In other News... (Score:2)
Here's a good link (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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Without knowing the actual details of the rate changes, it is hard to say for certain.. but this sounds like it could actually be a good thing for the smaller broadcasters. Unfortunately, the fact it is retroactive is repulsive.
Re:Retroactive? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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 t
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]
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RIAA Wins and Loses at the same time (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:RIAA Wins and Loses at the same time (Score:5, Insightful)
Distribution Control.
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Internet radio is screwing that up.
This law wasn't made to make them more money, this law was made to shut down Pandora, Last.fm and Live365.
Old school radio and royalty payment markets don't want you listening to streaming music on the internet. You might make an artist they don't control popular and rich and che
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.
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Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
i wrote my congresscritter (Score:2)
http://broadcaster.pandora.com/dm?id=C22D77F98E9E
Supply and demand (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Informative)
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An example: [idobi.com]
KROQ, "the nation's top rock station", would owe $1.4 _billion_ in royalties in 2010, if they paid the new internet rates. Their annual revenue is around $67 million. They are a highly successful radio station, and don't have to pay the per-user bandwidth fees that internet stations do (economies of scale). See the problem?
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Hmmm now here's a thought.
Design a little market place...
OK, well a web site to go along with your net radio.
Let advertisers bid per listener to place their ads for the upcoming block.
You will need to know what it takes to pay all royalties and whatever expenses you want to cover and then set a minimum bid.
If the minimum bid is exceeded, take the payment from the winning bidder and run your normal show. If the bid
analog != digital (Score:2)
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if it's licensed by the FCC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Interesting)
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The content of these stations is the music. The value of the station to advertisers is the number of people who are going to listen to it AND those stations use those stats to price their ads with the ad providers. Paying pay-per-track rather than pay-per-listener is clearly inequitable when the stations themselves earn money on a per listener basis.
The issue here is that internet radio stations want to pay what satellite radio pays. They were already paying double what satellite radio pays, and now they face astronomical increases that would bankrupt them.
Check out my earlier post [slashdot.org] for some useful websites.
I am not an internet radio broadcaster, just a listener.
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)
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[Emphasis mine.]
You mean how wrong the planned rate hikes are, don't you? The proposed legislation would stop them.
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 ;-)
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but will anyone notice? (Score:2)
It's June. The kids are out of school. The boat is in the water. The hamburgs are on the grill. There are a million better things to do than listen to the radio - any radio.
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Bills to pay and all that.
Some of those places even let their employees listen to internet radio stations while they work. There will be a lot of people who notice.
SHH to Canada... (Score:5, Funny)
What this is really all about is... (Score:2)
For the only way to deal with the irrationality of what is proposed is to do so with money and teamwork between the broadcaster. And that typically happens through business broadcast networks.
In other words, what many web broadcaster have accomplished in establishing web broadcasting audience is now going to be taken away from them as they go out of business or are merged and either shut down or become
WCPE Classical Station getting hit. (Score:3, Informative)
http://theclassicalstation.org/save_our_streams.s
Maybe a way around? (Score:2, Interesting)
You set up a SINGLE SERVER out of the country, say Sweden, Norway, Canada. You feed a SINGLE STREAM to that server. So you pay royalties on that single stream.
Now, that server just happens to mirror out to a few thousand listeners. But it's a different server, not you the Internet Radio Station. You're streaming just a single stream...
Potential here? I could see relocating a few big boxes and a few fat pipes out of the US just for such a purpose. Could be a lucrative little
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.
If a tree falls in the woods .. (Score:2)
While this is a a noble gesture, unfortunately it wont reach the people that mke the rules. The only thing that will catch their attention is cash.
unfortunately (Score:2, Insightful)
The music industry is ass backwards. (Score:4, Insightful)
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They want to kill all competition for the top-40 crapola plays exactly what the RIAA wants them to play stations (clear channel et al)
The RIAA likes radio but only when the stations are playing the music that the RIAA thinks should get promotion (i.e. the next big pop artist) and not what someone else thinks should get promotion (i.e. that obscure indy rock band)
Why I got XM :-) (Score:2)
Only thing I love/hate are the top hits lists. Seems like there isn't much variation (maybe the fans really do vote for the same stuff day in day out), but fortunately there are rock/techno/classic channels to pad out the day
Nobody said you had to unicast music over TCP/IP. That was your choice. Now they're adding ridiculous rates to the mix, hey, don't play RIAA brand music. Problem solved.
Tom
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I don't think their broadcast fees go this far. But if they do then sux0rz for them I guess.
Tom
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.
Well, you'd think so... (Score:2)
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...
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This might actually be a good thing (Score:2)
This might actually be a good thing. How? Internet radio webcasters could still use non-evil licensed music such as available on places like magnatune.com [magnatune.com]. That would then give the non-evil music more air-play and boost its acceptance over that of the companies with the old business model of music (based on rape the listener just enough to avoid their death). Carried far enough, maybe the old business model will finally die the death it deserves.
Inflation. Get used to it. (Score:2)
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.
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"Millions for defense, but not one penny for tribute,"
Robert Goodloe Harper (1818)
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Didn't everyone on
Re:What can I do? (Score:5, Insightful)
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... thereby proving their assertion that digital music / piracy is "bad" for their industry and inserting another nail in the coffin of digital rights. (The real kind, not the software enforced things that inhibit duplication of data.)
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You can read about what happened in 2002 on their website [somafm.com]. Basically, the record companies demanded $500 per day from SomaFM. SomaFM and its listeners responded by encouraging Congress to pass the Small Webcasters Amendment Act which reduced the royalty rates to a more manageable $2000 to $5000 per year.
What is different now is
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.
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... Now if we could just exercise it.
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Now for By and BY-SA this may be an option.
all the best,
drew
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