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Small Webcasters get Powerful New Ally
An anonymous reader writes "On, Sunday, October 20, 2002, the RIAA's subsidiary, SoundExchange, was set to introduce draconian new fees on small internet webcasters - fees that were designed to drive those webcasters out of business and preserve the RIAA's monopoly on the distribution of music in North America. One of those small webcasters is the Triangle's classical music station, WCPE - quite possibly the finest classical music station in the world. Now it turns out that WCPE has an 800 lb gorilla in their corner, and he's set his sights on the RIAA."
If you read the full article, you'll notice that Helms' office mentions that they heard from Religious broadcasters in the area that felt that the burden would still be too great on them.
Nevertheless, nice to see that even the Religious Right is "getting the idea" in terms of dealing with the RIAA...
Jesse Helms? I never would have thought that he was 800lbs...
www.christopherlewis.com
The best trance stations on the internet went down because of this law, and my music selection has hurt since. The only one left is Digitally Imported, which is ok but I like Tag's Trance and XTC radio better. A "dance" radio station started broadcasting in dallas recently, it is ok but is very repetitive. And I did buy two or three cds of artists I had heard on tag's or xtc, but now I buy none. Well, those were import CDs anyway and RIAA probably didnt get anything from them.
It says he stopped it because smaller webcasters said the new 'lower' rates would be worse than the 'higher' ones after a certain amount of time and would drive them out of business. Even the new 'lower' rates were too high for some of them.. So im guessing it'll go from .07 per listener to maybe .01 which would still be too much IMO.. RIAA doesn't deserve squat for free advertising. RIAA should be paying webcasters to play the music.
After all, he specializes in MP3s, and his songs are streamed from his site and mp3.com, but then again, one of his song is called "Why won't Jesse Helms just hury up and die"
I guess we now know why, he's meant to save the webcasters.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Well, you can bet the RIAA won't make the mistake of overlooking his campaign funding again! ;)
"...the Triangle's classical music station..."
What the hell is "the Triangle"? And why do they have a classical music station. Now I can understand a square might have a classical station, or maybe a pentagram would have an acid rock station.
Maybe it's because they use triangles in symphonies. What kind of station would a circle have, I wonder?
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I believe that was the infamous legislation which had a last minute 26 page addendum tacked on that changed it from being designed to ease finanical impact on small Webcasters into something deisgned to save a mere handful of the largest small webcasters and leave the others to hang.
It snuck through the house before people realized it had changed. So blocking it in the Senate actually was acting on the side of the small webcasters.
Check out the previous news on the subject for more details.
Beethoven and Mozart will compose more symphonies if they can put bread on their table.
With the bill blocked the small webcasters may have to pay a higher rate initially (or the flatfee), but have a better chance of getting more reasonable legislation passed rather than having to fight the legislation after it's passed.
Folks, if you dislike the RIAA's tactics and would like to listen to some alternative music, please give classical music a try...there's nothing like listening to some good ol' music.
You can: A, pay this wildly insane rate that will put you out of business. B, pay this lesser wildly insane rate that will put you out of business. C, hold out for a better deal.
I'm not a big fan of Jesse Helms, but it appears
that he is doing exactly what he should do as a
senator for North Carolina. He's representing the
interests of the state's residents in the Senate,
vs. representing the interests of an out of state
campaign donor.
How many states stand to gain under the webcasting
rates as approved in the House? Will there be a lot
of new jobs pursuing small webcasters who haven't
paid up? Will there be a lot of new technical skills
dispersed through the population by reducing the
number of webcasters through expensive licensing
and/or royalies fees? Will there be a boom in artisic
expression thanks to reduced chances for artists to
gain exposure?
Helms is right on this one. I wish more legislators
were looking out for their own constituencies on
matters like this, DMCA, etc.
Damin that Helms! I've released 3 albums of really killer sermons, and I haven't gotten a dime from these stations yet.
The article says that the bill was DESIGNED to ease the financial burden on small webcasters, but in all reality, it probably would not have.
.07 per person per song in royalties. Instead, at this point they can pay $500/yr (from 1998 to present, IIRC) to cover their costs.
.07/per song+person could raise some HEFTY fees.
They were to be charged
The small webcasters themselves had not been consulted when the original law was drafted and therefore felt that they would be put out of business by these "small" fees.
Sometimes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut.
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I thought surely my stance of thinking both the RIAA and the Religious Right were both wrong about everything would never be problematic.
But, no! Now, I might owe my ability to listen to all my favorite death metal, synth-pop, and hard house/trance webcasts to a group of people who generally only support things I vehemently oppose.
So. . . confused. . . cannot pick. . . side. . .
He's an 800 year old gorilla.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The Religious Right, incredible as it may seem, can be the killer ally of the digital freedom movement, just like Stalin was in WWII. Remember that morality vs. copyright case? (the right to edit movies to the customer's content)
When talking to any individual with such orientation, we have to stress that the current copyright fundamentalism is made to favor Hollywood - you know, that big, unholy, pornography-peddling anti-God collective in California. Mentioning Scientology might help too. YMMV.
Now THAT is an 800-lb. gorilla.
I heard awhile back that Jesse Helms was threatening awhile back to throw his weight to get the DMCA repealed if the big corps didn't stop abusing it. Seems he thought the bill was a good idea when it was passed, but believes the ways its being used are not the ways it was intended.
Now this is happening. But this article is so poorly written-- it starts out saying that jesse helms blocked a bill providing netcaster relief, but then later seems to be saying he only did this becuase he was holding out for a bill that gave even more netcaster relief.
So, is the idea that he actually believes the copyright laws should be in the public benefit? If so, okay, it's always good when "conservatives" actually attempt to uphold the principles the country was founded on as opposed to trying to disassemble them, but if that's the case why hasn't he actually done anything against the DMCA except for some public whining about it? And what does he think about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is one of the biggest sources of food for corporate abuse of copyright? Has he just not read it?
Dear god, please don't ever make me imagine Jesse Helms as a bedfellow.
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Now they have to pay the higher rate and gamble on whether they get any deal at all. Had Helms allowed the bill to pass, the small broadcasters would be paying a smaller fee and could follow up with another bill to gamble on.
A bird in hand....
A large chunk of classical music manuscripts are out of copyright. That means that if you can find someone to perform it, you can create free music. How are musicians paid? Recordings of concerts, where the costs are already met by selling tickets, might be one way. The quality won't be as high as a specially-made recording but it might be good enough. Whether the performers would agree depends on how much money they would get from enforcing copyright on the recording and trying to sell it commercially (not much I suspect).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
the difference between that "reduced flat rate" and the 70 cents per 1000 listeners per song can really be quite huge (even to very small stations).
lets say a station reaches 100 people on average and at 4 minutes per track averages 15 songs an hour. that's 360 songs a day, or 131,400 a year... at the other rate of 7 cents per 100 listeners it works out to a fee of $9,198 a year. to someone like this a flat rate of $500 seems like a pretty huge difference... heck this flat rate would come to almost half as much even if you only averaged 10 listeners (500 vs 918).
too bad the flat rate is only good till congress acts on the pending legislation, because this deal would probably actually be fairly viable for quite a few webcasters
Someone mentioned this before, but he got modded to 0 for some reason. Sen Helms is not running for reelection. His term is up in January. There is no "shakedown".
Too...many...cliched...sayings...can't...compute ...BOOOMM!!
The legislation that Helms blocked would have charged small webcasters a fee that, frankly, seems pretty trivial. If your margins are so thin that $500 per year makes the difference between making money or losing it, well, what you're running is not a business, it's a hobby. And, for that matter, I can easily see even hobbyists being willing to pay that much money. Heck, it's going to cost them more than that just for the data connection capable of supporting a half-dozen streams.
Now, I think small webcasters who broadcast their own material have a legitimate beef if the bill requires them to pay the RIAA, but for webcasters who are broadcasting a significant amount of RIAA music, then, frankly, it seems like a pretty decent deal.
I also think the artists have a legitimate beef, because practically none of this money will make it back to them. Since there's no accounting for individual songs required, there's no way to decided how much of the money should go to which artist. To record labels, that means the artists get none of it.
In summary, there seem to be problems with the way this is being done, but they're the same problems that exist with the Audio CD-R taxes -- the money goes to the Established Labels, regardless of what music is actually webcasted/copied, and the artists don't get any of it. But the amount of money is so trivial that I can't see it causing any real problems, even for semi-serious hobbyists.
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Dear sir,
It's hard to understand how I would include music that I still don't know in my playlists. Please ellaborate on that.
Yours truly,
Carlos.
Talk to us again once they get to censoring everything Hollywood puts out for sexual content and violence.
That'd be the point. See, the same people that are preventing you from watching DVDs on linux because you might steal them are preventing THEM from buying copies of "The Green Mile" with all the 'damns' changed to 'darns'.
Never confuse volume with power.
I work in a large CD store on the East Coast (Which one? I'll give you a hint, we've been financially fucked ever since the late 1990s, only partially due to P2P, more due to some really stupid decisions made out in California [that's another hint]). This gives me a unique opportunity to get a mildly decent idea of what people are buying - there's an almost representative sample of college kids, ten year olds, minivan moms, old fogies, hippie burnouts, and Dr. Joe Average in his SUV. Granted, classical music is not the largest seller in this store. But the people who buy classical music buy in BULK. It's not uncommon for one customer to slap down three Benjamins (that's $300 for those of you not 'hip' to my street slang) at a time for his latest classical bonaza. And several "artists" (Charlotte Church, Bocelli, Sarah Vaughn, Diana Krall) have reguarly placed in the top 25 sellers for the store - during weeks when Dave Matthews, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other mainstream artists came out with new releases. Granted, I'm not a fan of any of these artists (and Ms. Krall is slightly more in the jazz/vocals realm) - but what's important is that these people are selling in big numbers, which means SOMEONE out there is buying the stuff. To say that "people don't like classical music nowadays" is a rather ignorant statement to make. One of the reasons why classical doesn't often make it to the charts is that, let's take an example... Beethoven's 9th symphony. Would you like the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Ensemb-- do you understand my point? There's a wealth of different versions to choose from, and so the already merely-moderate consumer base is spread even thinner.
Granted, classical isn't usually that popular with the under-30 crowd (generalization). But it's been constantly popular with the elderly for the past three or four generations - and those aren't the same elderly, because OLD PEOPLE DIE. However, new ones are always cropping up to take their place. You can usually tell them by the Oldsmobiles with the stuffed animals in the back.
I think the difference is that Quarex has never tried to forbid the "churchies" from listening to their music, but the churchies have a history of wanting to censor things that they find objectionable.
Ironically, the last parts of your post did describe the attitude of organized religion, though.
Murphy was an optimist.
I've been awaiting the damage to WCPE for some time. Happy to see that they might not be affected so greatly. WCPE is a great station where they play classical music and DON'T just get money from the government, like PBS. It's a good example of how the market has demonstrated the ability to provide something people think it can't, more efficiently than the government.