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Webcasters and Record Industry Both Appeal Royalty Ruling
jonesvery writes: "Both Webcasters and record companies are appealing the proposed royalty structure suggested by an arbitration panel, according to this LA Times story. It should surprise no one that the Webcasters feel that the proposed royalties are absurdly high, while the record companies wants them to be higher -- at levels set in independent deals negotiated between the RIAA and a couple of dozen companies. The fact that many of the companies that made these independent deals with the RIAA couldn't make enough money to both pay the royalties and stay in business doesn't seem to worry the record companies much. Funny, that..." We did an earlier story about the royalty ruling. The internet radio community seems to be just a bit upset about the whole thing.
The fee is $1.40 per thousand listeners for Internet-only stations, and 70 cents per thousand listeners for over-the-air stations that simultaneously broadcast online.
How would the record companies enforce such a payment structure? It seems to me that would be no method of counting the listeners that couldn't possibly be altered by the webcasters especially with all the different webcasting programs out there. Does anyone have a clue how the Record Companies were planning to accurately count listeners?
They (RIAA) want to control it all. I seriously they doubt they give a rats ass about the chump change the internet generates in comparison to CD sales. It's quite obvious that most of the independant internet broadcasters (or really, more traditional radio broadcasters w/ internet casting as well) can't afford this price, and surprise surprise, the RIAA is using the legal system to squash an industry that they don't financially own.
That, and guess what? The RIAA can use this to threaten legal action against anyone who broadcasts music online.
So there's your answer. Manipulation of an already corrupted legal system to tighten their fist around everyone and everything. That's why they are doing this.
This will be the end of such wonderful music resources like Groove Salad and Digitally Imported. These two stations are largely responsible for me purchasing any CD's at all last year. I don't like any of the ultra-narrowband content being shoved down commercial radio, I don't listen to it. The only music I purchase comes from college radio and netcasts.
Instead of allowing natural forces to broaden everyone's musical horizons, the RIAA is stifling it back to the 20th century model. If they keep being sucessful in court, the only way to fight them will be to turn music into a grass roots listener supported movement. This can only be done by enabling good musicians to run their own businesses to support themselves. This means being internet-savvy and moving away from standard CD-distribution. It means not signing the deal with the devil and trying to make it on your own with live performances and micropayment downloads.
Sites that facilitate this could act much like record lables in the promotional aspect - they would serve only to group together musicians of common genre. Instead of taking most of the artists' revenues away, they can charge a low, flat listing fee for each artist per month, which in quantity could still be quite profitable for the wise entrepreneur.
It comes down to the fact that 90% of everything is STILL crap, and only the top 10% of musicians will make any real money at it. But it will still be 100X more than what the current RIAA model allows. It will be the breadth of availability, not the quantity of each genre, which will improve.
When art combines with money, it can be a bad thing if not done right. When it is done right, it's a pleasure to make a living doing what you love.
--Mike
I'm not sure about other wedcasters, these are just my opinions.
The very idea of having to pay royalties for the songs I play through a web cast is outrageous. I run a shoutcast from my computer, the playlist is managed by my girlfriend. The bitrate is set much lower than cd quality, and is really mostly for her and her friends enjoyment. The thought that the RIAA wants to charge me for broadcasting sub-standard quality music that one could record just as easily from a radio, is absurd. Radio stations broadcast music for several reasons:
1. entertainment. This I would rank as the primary focus of radio stations... people want to be entertained, and the less it costs them, the better.
2. To promote the artists. Lets face it, without radio stations and music video channels, most people would never buy the albums from the local music store. We hear a song that we like, find out who its by, and buy the album. I don't believe I have ever heard of somebody going into a music store and picking a random album and buying it because they thought it looked interesting. The music industry just doesn't work that way.
Why should I have to pay the music industry to entertain there fans, and to promote there music? When was the last time you heard ANY company complain about free advertising?
I could see the headlines now: "Microsoft Sues small-town software company for promoting microsoft software." This doesn't make sense, and neither does royalties on webcasts. Forcing webcasters to pay a royalty on a webcast is like making them pay the RIAA to promote the RIAA's product.
There is no piracy involved in this. There is no music bootlegging, or recording and any such thing. If the webcast listeners want to record and distribute illegal copy's of 24kbs, 22.05kHz, Mono music, by all means, let them. But do not make the webcasters pay for this. We want to entertain, and we want to promote our favourite artists. This is all, and the only fee we should have to pay, is the fee to obtain legal copy's of the music to begin with. This would merely involve taking a trip to our local music store, and purchasing a copy of the artists album.
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
Ok, so the current rate for over-the-air broadcasters is $0.0022 per listening hour . Or assuming 4 and a half minutes per song,
.0165 cents per person per song. And they want webcasters to pay .14 cents per song. What the hell are they thinking?
$0.0022 / ( 60 / 4.5) = $0.000165
or
The people on the panel must have invested money at the height of the dot-com boom and figured it was payback time....
ARGH!
We are dealing with numerous issues at the same time in situations like these, and we need to deal with each piece before we can really solve this situation.
Alright, I'm down off my soapbox. Just remember that there are reasons, even if we don't know them. The goverment doesn't just keep secrets to piss us off, and the RIAA doesn't want our money just so we can complain about it. The RIAA wants our money so it can be there to complain about in the years to come.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Yeah, business is business. Any attempt at outside interference is communism. Hmm... wait a minute. What would the record companies be worth if the government wasn't granting little 95-year feifdoms over each sound recording? They'd be worth JACK SHIT.
The recording companies are a product of government fiat. On what grounds does the government grant these copyrights? To "promote useful arts and sciences". They're regulating what I can and can't do to help out a certain class of people. Sounds kind of socialist to me.
I'm not advocating trashing copyright. What I'm saying is that using copyright to choke off the technology is an abuse. Try comparing these figures:
From the article:
From BMI:
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the RIAA wants atleast $0.70 per performance to 1000 listeners over the net. Meanwhile, they charge $0.12 for X listeners at the largest radio stations (where X is likely to be greater than 1000.) If this isn't abuse, I don't know what is.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
SaveInternetRadio.org or http://208.3.135.80/
Good clearinghouse on the whole issue and links to your representatives. Speak out now or shut up later.
Could webcasters negotiate their own royalty structure with independent bands? Sure you're getting a mixed bag when you do that, but a lot of the local bands I've taken in in various cities have really good stuff. Why not just tell the RIAA to get bent and only do business with musicians who aren't owned by "The Man"?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
" Perhaps if the RIAA can see that they will get either a small % or nothing at all we will see how greedy they are. then if the RIAA starts thier own streaming we can organize a boycott to deny them money. "
You clearly don't see what's going on here (and I'm PO'd not at you, but at what I see as the crux of the issue).
The RIAA DOESN'T WANT WEB BROADCASTING!
The RIAA sees the current business model as being fine, thank you. Yes, the RIAA will allow music downloading FROM THEM! Yes, the RIAA will allow music streaming FRMO THEM!
The point of pricing it so high is so that they can essentially own all the internet outlets for music. And they'll choke that so that the existing model will have to hold (Radio payola -- CD's with increasingly more draconinan copy protection built in -- and eventually more draconinan measures built into technology and law so that eventually all music will be pay-per-listen.
That is the dream of the RIAA.
Fight tne power.
Your right the world has not fundamentally changed, well it did, for a split second in the scope of history, but the status quo is making a return.
/. quit buying CDs today, it probably wouldn;t impact their income to a big degree. It's going to take some intestinal fortitude on behalf of the guys in the big house in washington to right the system.
Remember back when the internet was openned to the general public? The digital village they called it, the information superhighway they said.
Then came the e-commerce companies, the advertisers and suddenly the library and town square of our "Digital Village" became a strip mall subserviant to the big corporations. Now search engines, the once friend of the web surfer have sold out and become effectivly billboards on demand, spewing forth links bought and paid for by these companies(google being the exception for now). The number of free sites with information of any real interest or value have gone away, become pay sites or in many cases were bought out by large media companies long ago and became one more revenue stream (or loss write-off) for those companies. Is this all FUD or doom and gloom, no, not at all, there are economic rules in effect in this world and I believe that in the beginning, we as a "Digital village" were lied too. Instead of the free availablity of information our leaders envisioned only 6 years ago, we are quickly becoming the targets of a business model that shackles us to subscription fees for content that is in many cases is not original and in almost all cases was free until very recently. The more disturbing thing though is that rather then having a choice of content or rather unlimited original content, the media companies that so desire the revenue from subscription services choose the content that we have the option of seeing and in the case of the news networks especially limit that content(anybody notice that Routers would seem to be the only agency with journalists in the field? And anybody notice that every news site runs pretty much the same stories, virtually to the word anymore?)
Now to the RIAA. of course the RIAA and it's member companies want to put web radio out of business. Traditional radio makes money for them in roylaties. With traditial radio the music industry controlled the hits. The music industry controlled the stars. The music industry doesn't want to give up that control. The industry wants to put a credit card swipe on your CD player and charge you every time you listen to the cookie cutter band of the week's latest CD. Thats how they make money, well it probably isn't, but that's how they want to make money. The industry has shareholders, probably many of us by way of money markets and 401(k) accounts, that they need to keep happyand then there are all those other costs.
Fact is, they aren't going to change anytime soon. even if every regular reader of
What exactly has been done to define "webcasting?" The very term seems completely outdated. No one uses the "web" (HTTP) to deliver music any more. So what is the difference between webcasting and standard radio? Let's examine.
Is it having a web page? Of course not. Regular radio stations have web pages, same as webcasters. So clearly the web page itself is not the key factor.
Is it being digital? I don't think so. Consider the new XM satellite radio systems as well as small regionalized experiments with digital radio transmissions. Yet these would seem to be considered closer to tranitional radio than webcasting.
Is it being interactive? This is a big issue for the record companies...but how much control is required before something is interactive? Almost every radio station lets you e-mail song requests. So then, if a "webcaster" used the same mechanism, and disable any form of direct control, wouldn't they fall under the same category as radio stations?
Is it the content delivery mechanism? Consider the hypothetical situation where my computer has an FM radio card. Clicking on a link tunes my radio card to a radio station playing the song I want. Now I'm doing something interactive, web-based, and on-demand...everything that would seem to point to it being a webcaster, but since the music is coming in over standard radio waves, is it?
All of this brings me to my idea...let's grow 802.11 wireless networks specifically for broadcasting music. We aren't webcasting, it's radio wave transmission...same as regular radio stations. The 802.11 spectrum is licensed by the FCC, same as regular radio station.
Then once we are all broadcasting music via radio waves in our localized region, let's join the NAB and pay the same low royalties as regular radio stations. Could they stop us? What could they use to draw a distinction between one form of radio wave carrying music and another?
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Actually, historically, it does mean exactly that. Then the laws are modified, pulled, twisted, reworked, and shoehorned so as to cover the new medium, but usually with new features.
Originally, performed music wasn't covered at all by copyright, which was assumed to cover only printed works.
Originally, mechanical reproduction of music wasn't covered (player pianoes, anyone?). Congress eventually invented the idea of a mandatory license.
Originally, one could not have made personal copies of over-the-air broadcasts. Then VCRs came along and the courts -- followed eventually by Congress -- carved out new space for personal copies.
The point I'm making is simple: Copyright law most certainly adapts to new technologirs. There is no a priori reason that previous models, like radio, should (or should not) be applied to Internet streaming.
Take a lesson from 1984: The most effective means of control, for a tyrant, is to convince people that the terrible system in place (a) will always be in place and, more crushingly, (b) has always been in place. Don't subscribe to the manufactured history of the RIAA.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The RIAA controls what goes on the radio.
Actually, it wouldn't be too difficult for alternative radio stations to come together (via the Internet) to share non-corporate music. I have a radio station in my area that plays approximately 70% non-corporate. I'm sure the local musicians would love having their stuff heard nationwide/worldwide without being forced to go corporate.