The New Webcasting Compromise

arkham6 writes "According to a story on Yahoo, it appears that the RIAA and negotiators for webcasters have reached a tentative deal for reduced rates for 'small' webcasters. However, it appears now that the artists themselves are going to jump into the fray because the record companies now may be able to weasel out of paying the artists."

Comments

let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

I never really did figure out if this affected every single broadcaster. My question is if this affects people webcasting music that has nothing to do with RIAA and its multitude of labels? If I recorded myself playing and webcasted that along with some recordings of friends of mine, would I have to pay them the webcasting fees?

The Screen Savers

[NickMc2000]

This story was on The Screen Savers tonight. For those that don't know, it is the number 1 tech show. They interviewed Steve Wolf of Wolf-FM. Heres a link to the site they gave out: http://www.saveinternetradio.net/

Librarian: did he ever admit the bad data source?

[geekotourist]

After the head librarian set the rates, it came out that the numbers he worked with came from Yahoo, which set that rate to shut out small broadcasters. It is as if an economist setting some tax rates for, say, software, used numbers straight from Microsoft, even though Microsoft can do monopoly pricing. Or if the economist was testing the average price of toys, and measured prices only on November 26 and December 26 (both traditionally big sales days in the US). In other words, the foundation of his report- the Yahoo data- was unreliable.

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.

Re:It's over?

[D iz a n k Meister]

How do they know how many people are listening to a song? What if no single person listens to the whole song?

The whole concept is nonsense.

[Beautyon]

We listen to online freeform radio from the USA every day. They have realtime updated playlists. Its simple to find information about the music being played, by a simple right click. We can then check out the t-shirts and CDs.

There should be no charge for streaming online from non commercial entities. Period. Anyone can start a station, and see thier trafic explode if they play good sets. This new tax will dampen down or cap the potential size of audiences, which for independent labels will be a very bad thing.

Anyway, how are they goning to police this?

Streaming is no different to file sharing; its just copying a very long number. There cannot be one law for streaming and no law for P2P filesharing; there should be the same unrestrictive constitutional guarantees for both.

Copyright is Haram. This means that you can put a server in a sharia country, securely tunnel into it and then stream from there. Unfortunately the cost of doing this wont be worth the hassle, much less the threat of having charges to a company in Iran showing up on your credit card bill!

Ummm, were you trying to say something?

[twitter]

Who needs the RIAA to promote their band? The artists want more not less and don't think they need you at all. An aquantiance has made the point better than I can, and this little deal is no different from others offered before. Among the outrages:

Retroactive Fuck:Under the regime, small webcasters will be required to pay artists and record companies a percentage of their revenue, sources said. The deal includes language that will make it retroactive until 1998, the year set by Congress as a cutoff for payment, and will allow webcasters to pay the earlier rates in installments. Wow, my friend is on the installment plan for broadcasting over the web, no RIAA music involved either!

Money goes to RIAA for the usual "promotion deductions" Although artists rights groups appear to have no problem with a deal that helps small webcasters, a union official expressed concern about language that could allow the record companies to avoid paying artists their share of the royalty directly. The language seems to allow the recording industry to deduct the top expenses that they incur for setting up and maintaining the royalty payment regime.

All and all the same old shit, but it won't last. As if there were only a need for five recording companies and four broadcasters in the world. Anything the RIAA can agree to is just another screw to all in order to keep their artificial monopoly on selling popular culture alive. 802.11b and similar will eliminate the RIAA racket, bring money back to artists and music to the masses. With government out of future broadcasting, your days are numbered, pig.

Re:Ummm, were you trying to say something?

[Deth_Master]

This is the heart of the issue. We are not listening to what the RIAA wants us to listen to. Pop culture will eventually die. Perhaps that will eventually produce a generally more diverse populous.
Image the changes: fashon would be based on a different idol (instead of britney spears, n-sink, etc. not sure if that's better or not), the music industry would become much more diverse. The changes to culture would be huge. I wonder what the effect on things like MTV and VH1 would be....

RIAA, make up your mind.

[tsg]

When the artists question you about their low royalty payments, you complain about having to pay independent promoters (aka "payola workaround") to get the songs on the radio thus getting exposure.

Now, here comes a bunch of people who want to play your songs, giving them as much if not more exposure, and you're trying to charge them for it?

Well, which is it?

Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, yeah, we'll give you a discount. Let's see...(um, how much were we going to pay the artist? Ten cents?) OK, we'll give you a ten cent discount. How's that? (Sorry, artist, we can't 'afford' to pay you anything now.)"

Re:The REAL Killer, the $500 Minimum fee

[NevDull]

Nice to see that we have a lot of Burger King employees chiming in on the issue.

If you can pay for the bandwidth necessary to stream to a number of people, you can pay a $500 minimum.

Minds are like parachutes, they only work when they're open.

How much will this really cost small webcasters?

[Reziac]

The article noted that the rate works out to 70 cents per song per 1000 listeners. Now, I have no idea how many people can actually connect to a given webcaster at the same time, but just to keep the math simple, I'll postulate 1000 listeners (and do a little rounding).

At an average of about 4 minutes per song, that's about 15 songs per hour, so that means (assuming I didn't drop a decimal somewhere):

1000 listeners costs the webcaster around $10/hour in royalties, or about $7500 per month.

100 listeners costs the webcaster around $1/hour in royalties, or about $750 per month.

10 listeners costs the webcaster around $0.10/hour in royalties, or about $75 per month.

That strikes me as being WAAAAY over what that many listeners can bring in revenue, considering that advertisers want to know that their ads are being seen/heard by a certain minimum number of listeners.

So I don't see how this is any great improvement over the previously-stipulated rate. It's kinda like telling someone who earns minimum wage that you'll reduce their fee to $1 million, because the previous $2 million fee wasn't affordable.