Congress Passes SWSA

signer writes "Congress has passed the Small Webcaster Settlement Act (House of Representatives link). Webcasters have until December 15th to negotiate Percentage-of-Revenue royalty payments, and they have the option of changing their status to non-profit and gaining a delay until June 30, 2003 to pay owed royalties from previous years. RAIN (www.kurthanson.com) has details."

Comments

comments from somafm

[pengwen2002]

The folks at somafm have some interresting links and comments too.

Just listen to webradio from other countries then

[hazzzard]

Well, I don't really care where the music comes from.
Even if you don't understand the foreign languages,
there are tons of webradios elsewhere
that will not suffer from these problems
(i.e. don't have to do massive advertisements to afford casting good music).

• Antenne Bayern (Bavaria, Germany) - click on "Live h\"oren"
• FFH (germany)
• HR XXL (Germany)
• BBC (UK)

Does anybody have some links to good webradios in Italy, spain, mexico etc.?? Please post!

Re:There's nothing wrong with this bill

[pla]

Umm... Have you looked at the business model of a conventional broadcast radio station, lately?

They do *exactly* what you say seems so "wrong" for webcasters.

And, to add insult to injury, the RIAA actually *PAYS* "normal" radio stations to play that copyrighted music.

washingtonpost.com story has details

[rhwalker22]

washingtonpost.com's story quotes several small webcasters praising the compromise bill. According to the article, the bill "does not establish specific royalty rates for webcasters. Instead, it authorizes the music industry's principal royalty collector, SoundExchange, to negotiate binding royalty contracts with small webcasters on behalf of all artists and record labels." Strange footnote: Sen. Jesse Helms had a big stake in the bill as he successfully protected small religious webcasters from the royalty axe.

Re:Annual minimum royalty

[Liquor]

There is an annual minimum royalty of $500, which means that the smallest of small webcasters may not be able to afford it.

Umm... I think it's even worse than that.

I'm no expert at translating from legalese, but it sure seems that $500 is for past revenues, in 1998 - and there's a $2000 per year minimum after that, i.e. $6K for 1999, 2000, and 2001, and then another $2K minimum for 2002. And that's just to settle PAST broadcasts. So there's a minimum outlay of about $8500 for ANY webcaster that's been around for those years.

Even if a webcaster is non-profit, with no income, they want 5% of expenses - still subject to the minimums.

Oh, and you're a small webcaster until you make more than a $1.25 Million?

Clear-channel

[Triv]

This is slightly OT, but I realised something disturbing a few hours ago and it does relate to the radio/webcasting debate in a roundabout way.

I've got a friend coming into New York tonight, so I figured I'd check out a few local venues to see who's playing, what's going on and all that. One of my favorite music venues is Irving Plaza. (flash site) I like going to random shows, I like supporting local music and I like circumventing the RIAA as much as is possible.

Chck out the link above - see what's in the lower left-hand corner of the homepage under the Irving Plaza logo? "Clear Channel Entertainment."

Fuck.

I. Can't. Get. Away. :(

Triv

Re:What about classical stations?

[Frobnicator]

what happens to classical stations now?

I assume you are talking about the time, and not the style? Nothing changes for those people.

The music itself is in the public domain.

The PERFORMANCES are owned by someone. If you have 1845 recording from the London Symphony Orchestra, that's in the public domain. If you have a 2001 perfomance of the same work by the same Orchestra, then you need to work out the rights.

frob.