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Except that Pandora is in danger of going away for the same reason.

this is nothing more than a leveraged attempt by the RIAA (aka soundexchange) to split small net station support from larger net stations. it shows the RIAA is concerned congress will step in. they are hoping to fracture support among constituents. keep in mind: soundexchange is collecting royalties for all performances on the net. even artists that are not under contract by anyone represented by the RIAA. The RIAA has legal authority over a compulsory license that covers all recorded music. SoundExchange considers any digital song performance as falling under the RIAA compulsory license. Here is a list of artists about to forfeit the money soundexchange collected for them. Soundexchange only lists these artists just before they are about to forfeit. Soundexchange does not contact the artists. Soundexchange does not list artists that are not about to forfeit their royalties. And not one of these artists, is under contract with any RIAA company. Soundexchange has yet to charge commercial terrestrial radio 1 cent for songs. These rates against digital internet radio are meant to smash the competition before it gets started. Corporate conglomerates such as Clear channel don't want net radio gaining a foothold. The Copyright Royalty Board is in Sound Exchange's back pocket. Congress is the only hope for freedom on this one. check out http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/030207/inde x.shtml for a breakdown on rates and how it breaks down.

The RIAA will step on anyone at the will of the major labels money. Please help stop the RIAA and the band of Corp. thieves.

HELP SAVE NET RADIO IN THE US..

http://www.loc.gov/crb/proceedings/2005-1/rates-te rms2005-1.pdf

SaveNetRadio.org

Help Keep Internet Radio Online

Whats Happening

On Friday March 2nd 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board announced new royalty rates for Internet Radio stations. The rates are retroactive to January of 2006.

The new rates are far higher than any industry experts expected. In fact, if they remain unchanged, bankruptcy looms for many online radio stations.

The new rates essentially levy a tax of $0.0011 per performance. Now, that doesn't sound bad does it. But consider this. Each hour, the average radio station plays 16 songs. So that's about 1.76c per hour, per listener. A station with 500 listener average would be hit with fees of $211 per day, $6,336 a month or $76,000 a year.

This amount of money is beyond the resources of all but the very wealthiest of corporations. Many of the internet radio stations are run by enthusiasts and hobbyists. These small stations are the ones bringing new music, and old favorites to you every day. Music you can't hear on corporate-owned terrestrial stations.

Could this be the day the music died?

What can you do?

If you enjoy internet radio, HEARING YOUR BAND ON INTERNET RADIO, you need to make your feelings known right now to your representatives in the Congress and Senate. Write to them and ask them to help repeal the decision of March 2nd by the Copyright Royalty Board. It only takes a couple of minutes.

SaveNetRadio.org

Congress: House.gov/writerep

Senate: Senate.gov

More background on this decision

SaveNetRadio.org

DigiMedia.org

DigiMedia.org FAQ

KurtHanson.com

Broadcastlawblog

Thank you & please help.

http://myspace.com/scottandpam

Go here. Read the first sentence. Eat brownies.

As far as the retroactive royalty fees go, I hate to disagree with you, but while I think it will cause some chaos, I also think that it will be fought tooth and nail, and I don't think the RIAA is going to come out on top of this one.

I'm sure a lot of Internet broadcasters are hoping that is the case. Watch for appeals to come from the National Association of Broadcasters, and the Digial Media Association on behalf of the big media companies. They are the only ones with the resources to fight this. Whether their appeals are successful, and whether they will benefit smaller, independent stations, remains to be seen.

I hate to point you back to the link in the summery, but the rates are right at the top, including those for 2006. The Copyright Royalty Board fully intends to collect these royalties, and are well within their mandate to do so. If your station played copyrighted works in 2006, you will pay royalty fees for the use of that material (although the fees may ultimately be reduced, as they were in 2002. Scroll down to the bottom of Kurt's page for coverage of that go-around).

'm rather wondering why you think this would require us to turn our back on the last hundred years of culture.

This was in response to the notion that this will somehow be of benefit to independent artists.

First of all, this royalty is collected on all performances, even those of works by non-RIAA artists. The RIAA lobbied hard for these rates, and are licking their chops at the prospect of collecting them, but don't make the mistake of thinking fees will not be collected for all songs played, even those of "independent artist." The "sound recording copyright owner" is entitled to compensation, and anyone can apply to Sound Exchange for their cut, just like Sony or EMI or whomever. The only problem is the allocation of these royalty payments is based on aggregate totals from the industry as a whole, meaning all those Clear Channel stations that stream their FM broadcasts skew the numbers in favour of established artists. The independent artist is unlikely to see any money, even if they are getting airplay on stations not so beholden to the RIAA marketing machine.

So why don't Internet broadcasters play only "free music," licensed through Creative Commons or something?

Many do, and some even get a few listeners I'm sure. But there are other costs associated with running a radio stations, including the cost of maintaining your music catalog (even if you don't "pay" for the music, you need to acquire it, sift through it to separate the good from the bad, store it etc.), bandwidth costs, on-air talent, the cost of maintaining a website that offers features that will attract listeners, BMI/ASCAP royalties (still gotta pay those, don't forget) and sundry costs incurred by any small business. Attracting a listener base sufficient to offset these costs while exclusively playing independently produced, Creative Commons licensed, music by artists nobody has heard of is a heavy lift. Not saying it can't happen in the long run, but I don't see independently run Internet radio stations with no other source of revenue surviving long enough to make this a reality.

But the 'big media' companies who stream their FM broadcast will be subject to these fees too, so what's the problem?

Frankly, they will probably lose money as well. That doesn't mean they won't use Internet streams as a "loss leader," to get people who listen to them on their commute to tune in while the're at work, all the while bombarding them with on-air commercials, ads on their website and compiling marketing data that can be sold to offset some of these costs.

The small, independent station can

This

message is to every musician speaking out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a middleman or lazy. Squidnecks

You major label suckers make me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, "Hey we cut your paycheck in half because you've got to help pay for the 250 billion copies we give away. Have they mentioned when they cut new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first? I'll tell you: the business that's about to make it's bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those same five labels that pay them are charging you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you're negotiating whether or not the latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they've positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can't really expect to turn the tide with a few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT'S THE ISPs, IT'S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed monopoly by the FCC so

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock

this is not an issue of children not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn't even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it's creat

Webcasters of a certain size

Noncommercial stations pay 2 cents per song per listener.

SoundExchange in charge of collecting all copyrighted works (even non-RIAA)

It looks like if you are willing to make deals with EVERY artist(copyright owner) of the music you want to play, then yes, you don't have to pay the new fees that were forced upon webcasters. So it's true, you have come up with one situation where my statement could be false. But that doesn't mean what I said was "absolutely untrue". Webcasting was really catching on, and it got kicked in the nuts. Especially with the backpay.

Now Rolling Stone is behind P2P and Internet radio according to this full page ad that they ran in the NYT yesterday in support of P2P. They may be just fishing for new readersip, but it is still an entertaining read. The full text of ad is available in PDF format, or as follows:

A big fat thanks to record execs

Thank you for fighting the good fight against Internet MP3 file-swapping. Because of you, millions of kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands. No more spreading the word to complete strangers about your artists. No more harmful exposure to thousands of bands via Internet radio either. With any luck they won't talk about music at all. You probably knew you'd make millions by embracing the technology. After all, the kids swapping were like ten times more likely to buy CD's, making your cause all the more admirable. It must have cost a bundle in future revenu, but don't worry - computers are just a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid. -Rolling Stone

Now Rolling Stone is behind P2P and Internet radio according to this full page ad that they ran in the NYT yesterday in support of P2P. They may be just fishing for new readersip, but it is still an entertaining read. The full text of ad is available in PDF format, or as follows:

A big fat thanks to record execs

Thank you for fighting the good fight against Internet MP3 file-swapping. Because of you, millions of kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands. No more spreading the word to complete strangers about your artists. No more harmful exposure to thousands of bands via Internet radio either. With any luck they won't talk about music at all. You probably knew you'd make millions by embracing the technology. After all, the kids swapping were like ten times more likely to buy CD's, making your cause all the more admirable. It must have cost a bundle in future revenu, but don't worry - computers are just a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid. -Rolling Stone

In a recent public letter, the Rolling Stone disses the record company executives totally over this kind of crap.

Excerpts from the letter:
"Because of you, my kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands."

"No more harmful exposure of thousands of bands through Internet radio, either."

"Don't worry, computers are just a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid."

Just glancing at stuff, a very disturbing aspect of the bill is that for an individual webcaster, it defines as "gross revenues" to include any revenue from media, entertainment, Internet or wireless business where the individual owns more than %5. I don't really know, if this is how it works, but if Joe Blow owns a computer consulting company doing wireless installs, (or hell has 5% of it), and he streams mp3s somewhere, does he have to pay licensing and royalty fees on the revenues of his business?!?!?!?

Looks like Gephardt and some other Democrats opposed it.

They don't. Either you read wrong or I didn't explain clearly. The "maximum" is the amount of money you can make to be categorized in the small webcaster fee schedule.

Here's the actual law:

`(iv)(I) Subject to subclause (II), an `eligible small webcaster' is a webcaster (as defined in section 261.2 of title 37, Code of Federal Regulations, as published in the Federal Register on July 8, 2002) that--

• `(aa) for the period beginning on October 28, 1998, and ending on December 31, 2002, has gross revenues during the period beginning on November 1, 1998, and ending on June 30, 2002, of not more than $1,000,000;
• `(bb) for 2003, together with its affiliates, has gross revenues during 2003 of not more than $500,000; and
• `(cc) for 2004, together with its affiliates, has gross revenues, third party participation revenues, and revenues from the operation of new subscription services during 2004 of not more than $1,250,000.

And the part on the percentages:
For eligible nonsubscription transmissions made by an eligible small webcaster during the period beginning on October 28, 1998, and ending on December 31, 2002, the royalty rate shall be 8 percent of the webcaster's gross revenues during such period, or 5 percent of the webcaster's expenses during such period, whichever is greater... [it then goes into details on exceptions but you can look that up for yourself, and the royalty goes up in 2003-2004]

So there is no maximum, and that's why netcaster aggregators like Live365 don't like this bill, because it doesn't give them a break... and they had some HUGE expenses back in the dotcom days.

The inclusion of royalties based on expenses actually does a lot of harm to deep-pocketed netcasters, the guys who had lots of venture cap and spent like crazy back in the late 80s. But the people who have been webcasting for a while, and doing it on a shoestring budget, they're the ones that will benefit the most from this.

It does not matter how you count the number of radio stations, all that matters is there will be many more big guys than little guys in the years to come.

No, there will be fewer mid-sized guys. The big guys are few and far between and don't care. They're happy to pay per song per listener because they see radio as an add-on to their existing internet offerings. Yahoo and AOL don't want to pay 10% of their revenue when they could pay per song per listener. The whole reason the CARP fees are so high is because when the fees were being set, the big guys wanted a barrier to small competition.

Everyone is acting like the RIAA $500 minimum is the only fee that a hobby broadcaster would have, but it's not. And I don't see all the complaints about the minimum $700 a year internet radio stations legally have to pay to ASCAP/BMI/SESAC. You know why you don't? Because the smallest broadcasters are off everyone's radar. By the time that ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and even the RIAA come looking for you, you've established a good sized audience.

One this this bill confirms is that multiple hobbyists can get together and stream multiple streams from a group web site. Why isn't anyone talking about doing this? Congress gave you a loophole, take advantage of it. Hell, take it a step further. Create a non-profit version of Live365. HR5469 even expands the definition of non-commercials to include any non-commercial organization, not just FCC-licensed non-commercial stations, and they can qualify for the lower per song per listener rates from the original CARP ruling.

Next, this was a bait and switch move. Nothing you said changes that. They put one bill forward, got public approval for it, then switched it for another.

Hi. That's how politics works.

Bills change. Every special interest is trying to get something put in the bill to make them happy. It's all about compromise. The original version of HR5469 was tabled. There was not enough support in congress to pass it. So the sponsoring congressmen made changes to it, shopped it around to all the other congressmen, and finally they all came up with something they could settle on.

Why am I suddenly the bad guy? Am I not a little guy too? Just because I spent a lot of time and effort working to create a radio station that people could enjoy? Because we established a small but decent sized audience? I wish I made some money from the "selling out" I'm accused of doing, at least I would have something to show for it!

But all I'm doing is trying to get SomaFM back on the air. It's still going to cost me $6500 in retroactive fees if HR5460 passes (and $2000 a year after that). Do you think I'm happy about that? But compared to $200,000 or more if HR5469 is not approved.

All for a glorified hobby.

All because I want to expose more people to the music that I love, the music that I can't find anywhere else on the radio in the US.

Thanks for listening to my "load of crap".

--Rusty

At the start of all this, the librarian set the rates based on one Yahoo agreement. But Yahoo set these rates to shut out (kill off) smaller broadcasters. Marc Cuban admitted this, as was reported here. Yahoo admitted this to Congress- from
this SJMercury article:

"David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of media and entertainment, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May that the agreement had been misapplied ``to set excessive rates for an entire industry.''

I've read nothing that implies that the head librarian has admitted that he used a flawed data source. Not to mention the inherent flaw of using just ONE sample point. Sure, sometimes you can use a single point for a decision "J likes this movie, so I'll see it." But basing rates that can strangle an entire ongoing industry on one sample? With your one sample being an obvious statistical outlier?

Even in qualitative research you still make sure you have *representative* samples. But this shouldn't be qualitative. This is business. A sector of the economy, however new and small. For this you use quantitative data. For this you hire an econ graduate student and have them spend a couple of weeks gathering data... But ONE sample point??!?? For an entire industry??!?? (Visual of 10,000 Statistics lecturers snapping their chalk in disgust.)

(1) i.e. remember the debates on reporting requirements and sunset provisions in the PATRIOT Act? Congress seemed to say that asking Congress to revisit and rewrite (or simply extend) the law 2 years later was an unusual request: better to just make it indefinite. The Executive Branch acted as if requiring reviews, updates and progress reports was tantamount to not wanting the law at all. And even the Supreme Court isn't immune, which would be bad news for the Eldred case and Lessig. The Scotus questioning implied that even if the extension is *wrong*, negating the extension could cause chaos. Wouldn't want the public domain and the Constitution to get in the way of Convenience, would we?

It's $.0007 per listener per song

100 listeners
* 480 3 minute songs a day
* 30 days a month
-----------
1,440,000 performances a month
* $.0007
-----------
$1008 a month in royalties due

right now tag's trance trip has almost 2000 users connected, that's around $20k due in royalties each month.

there's lots of other crap involved too like record keeping, check http://www.kurthanson.com/ for more info.

Did he ever admit that his model relied on abnormal data? I've seen nothing that shows that he re-ran any of his financial models. A good researcher admits when a data source is retroactively found to be inaccurate- the librarian is so far not acting as such. He needs to redo his calculations based on multiple data sources.

It seems that the the Deal that Yahoo struck with the RIAA a while back has an awful lot to do with the back room shennaniganns that were somewhat implicate in the CARP arrangement.

This deserves major news coverage of it's own.

Kurt Hanson of Save Internet Radio has a letter that he received from Mark Cuban, former owner of audionet.com/broadcast.com/Yahoo! Broadcast on how the Yahoo!-RIAA deal was structured. Read the entire letter here.

Bottom line:

• The voluntary royalty deal between Yahoo! and the RIAA that the Librarian of Congress announced as his template for the entire industry last week was a deal crafted by Yahoo! to shut out small webcasters and decrease competition.
• The villian in this story is not Yahoo! (They were simply being savvy businesspeople!) The villian is the CARP process by which this anti-broadcaster, anti-small-webcaster deal became the template for the industry
• As Mark Cuban says, they didn't want percent-of-revenue pricing art Broadcast.com Why? Because "it meant every "Tom , Dick, and Harry" webcaster could come in and undercut our pricing because we had revenue and they didn't".

Since I couldn't get this story submitted (too much Microsoft crap to fight through, apparently), this seems like a good place to pass on the story: Cuban says Yahoo!'s RIAA deal was designed to stifle competition

Mark Cuban:

Now, no one asked me any of these things prior, during, or after the first or second pricing. I'm not sure that this matters. But if it does, here it is: The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a "percentage-of-revenue" to survive, couldn't.

As originally seen at: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2002/06.htm l#24-jun-2002, although JWZ seems to have taken down that news post at the moment (?).

P.S. Does anyone else who lost moderator access on the Thread of Doom find that they can't get any stories submitted any more, or is it just me? I'm beginning to cultivate a healthy persecution complex :)

For the bandwidth providers I'm familiar with, you buy the max # of simultaneous users you want for a month, and if you don't use all of it, tough luck.

Bear in mind that terrestrial radio pays zero to the RIAA. The RIAA counters with the "perfect digital copy" argument. I have two responses to this: 1) The copies aren't perfect. I rip my music at 256k (much higher quality than most stations) and broadcast at 96k, which is good quality. Each song the listener hears has gone through two encoding processes, and is nowhere near CD quality, "perfect" though subsequent reproductions may be. 2) Terrestrial radio's AM and FM digital broadcasts are exempt from paying RIAA fees.

Also, bandwidth cost is subject to technological improvement and market competition. The CARP/LoC rates are based on one deal, between the RIAA and Yahoo! at the height of the dot com boom. It was supposed to represent what a willing buyer and willing seller would agree to, but its hard to determine that when the seller doesn't really want to sell.

Check out this link, which compares composition and recording performance rates for other countries. It concludes, "royalty rates for performance of sound recordings are no higher, and indeed, are generally set lower than royalty rates for the musical composition."

I've heard that ASCAP charges around 3% of station revenue for terrestrial stations. CARP abandons the percentage of revenue model, and instead uses a per-stream fee that works out to over 100% of revenue (for those stations which have revenue, this is.) The RIAA is advocating a type of royalty this is without precedent in the US, and a rate which is grossly disproportionate to what is charged in countries which do charge performance fees.

You conclude by suggesting that the labels should waive these fees, in order to promote their music. Nice idea, but the goal here isn't to promote music, its to control its' distribution. Records companies are comfortable with the hit-driven market, where relatively few artists make the majority of profit. The RIAA is composed of record companies; if they opposed the RIAA's approach, they would make it back down. They are actually encouraging it. They want to destroy internet radio as it stands today, and replace it with something under their control.

I run Detroit Industrial Underground. My station has a 20 simultaneous listener capacity, and I've been broacasting for 3.5 years. To give you an idea of the small scale of most internet broacasts, DIU is currently ranked 222 out of around 2800 stations on the Shoutcast directory for total time spend listening (TTSL).

Some thoughts, based on what I've read here:

Terrestrial radio stations with webcasts are as unhappy with these rates as internet broadcasters are, and they'll be lobbying against this as well.

Some people have said that these rates won't apply to stations which only play non-RIAA material. While common sense would suggest that, it has not been proven yet, and common sense doesn't seem to apply to anything involving the RIAA and U.S. Congress.

Ephemeral recordings are "temporary" recordings made solely for broadcast purposes. In the case of internet radio, they're referring to MP3s. In practice, its an excuse to add another 8.8% fee on top of the per listener per song $0.0007.

Moving outside the U.S. won't save internet radio. U.S. based Broadcasters can be tracked through ISP's and billing relationships with hosting companies. Also, other countries have licensing bodies which are just as rapacious as the RIAA. In Canada, SOCAN is pushing Tariff 22, which imposes a $0.25 per unique listener per month fee. This adds up to more than the RIAA + BMI/ASCAP/SESAC fees, and forces listener tracking/subscriptions for auditing purposes. See the Stop Tariff 22 website for the details.

The battle isn't lost yet. On the Shoutcast list, we're working on our response to this. In the meantine, check out Save Internet Radio and the Radio and Internet Newsletter. Finally, write your reps in Congress, and include your snail mail addresss so they know you're a constituent.

The problem with this rate is that it's still based on the number of songs the station broadcasts. Most webcasters were hoping for a rate based on a percentage of their revenue. But, this was rejected.

So, even with this reduced rate, we're still going to see almost all webcasters go out of business. It's even going to be hard for the big businesses. I work for a large internet radio company, and I was just told by our exec in charge of working with the RIAA that our rates would probably go up about $500,000-600,000/yr from our current rate. He said one reason is because even if a user skips a song, it still counts as a play.

For more info, I highly suggest checking out RAIN (Radio And Internet Newsletter).

I did my part and wrote my senator and Representative asking them to not pass the CARP recommendations. I am happy that they came to their senses and rejected that awful proposal. Still it is something to think about that the government is becoming more aware of how information is exchanged on the net and working to pass FAIR and JUST laws to regulate it. I think this type of legislation will only take time to eventually be implemented.

A search on google for Internet Radio Returns 2,660,000 Hits. This is some indication of how popular Internet Radio is becoming. I tried to gather places on the Net whom have added the wonderful news to their site already, but it seems the only one I can find at the moment is the link given and this one Radio And Internet Newsletter.

kurthanson.com is the homepage for the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN), a fine spot for up-to-date information on what's going on in the world of webcasting.
Found both of these links at WFMU, aka numero uno webcasting radio station in the world.
Gotta love the fact that the RIAA wants to see that webcasters pay fees on top of the ASCAP/BMI fees that "real" radio stations do without getting any of the payola.
At any rate, it'll be interesting to see what the Librarian of Congress does in the next 30 days.

http://www.rice.edu/cb/sos/ -- Information pertaining to the effect of the CARP recomendations upon non-commerical radio stations.

http://www.kurthanson.com/ -- RAIN is a trade publication for the Internet Radio industry. This is an excellent site to keep tabs on how the campaign is going to stop these fees and reporting requirements.

http://broadcastpromotions.net/carp/ -- This site allows you to send faxes through their web site and directly to the person in Washington that you should be bugging.

The CARP proposal, if passed, will take effect on or about May 21, 2002.

This is a direct result of poltical pressure from small webcasters, and shows that the system does respond to such pressure.

Last Thursday, before the Roundtable at the Library of Congress on the CARP recordkeeping rules, there was a "Hill Walk" organized by Kevin Shively of Beethoven.com and other small webcasters, who went to the Capitol and meet with legislators and their staffers to explain their position. Earlier, on May 1, the same group organized the "day of silence" on Internet radio, to show the result if the situation wasn't changed. This hearing was one result from this politcal campaign.

More information about this grass-roots effort can be found at SaveInternetRadio.com, and some of the best coverage is in the Radio and Internet Newsletter.

• AZ: Jeff Flake
• CA: Anna Eshoo
• CA: Michael Honda
• CA: Tom Lantos
• CA: Zoe Lofgren
• FL: Corrine Brown
• FL: Ander Crenshaw
• IL: Lane Evans
• UT: Chris Cannon
• VA: Rick Boucher
• VA: James Moran
• WA: Brian Baird
• WA: Norman Dicks
• WA: Jennifer Dunn
• WA: Doc Hastings
• WA: Jay Inslee
• WA: Rick Larsen
• WA: George Nethercutt
• WA: Adam Smith

Visit saveinternetradio.org, a site by the folks behind the Radio And Internet Newsletter, or RAIN. We in the radio broadcast industry are doing everything we can to make it clear that the CARP recommendations, based almost line-by-line on what the RIAA asked for, would effectively eliminate radio broadcasters from the internet streaming arena. Oddly enough, RIAA member companies are in the process of rolling out their own for-pay services... coincidence, right?

At one end of the spectrum are a small group of webcasters such as Yahoo! and AOL well-established Internet companies, with numerous successful revenue streams, tens of millions of subscribers or users, and well-defined infrastructures already in place. ... In stark contrast are most webcasters (such as Live365), which currently operate at the opposite end of the spectrum. These webcasters are in the early stages of development, are constantly experimenting with different business models, revenue sources, and methods of developing their customer base, and have not yet established substantial revenue streams. ...

In determining the royalty rate and methodology that willing buyers in the marketplace would accept, the CARP focused on a single license agreement which was negotiated between Yahoo! and the RIAA. ... the CARP's emphasis on a single agreement which was negotiated by an atypical webcaster was arbitrary and erroneous.