New Royalty Rates Could Kill Internet Radio

FlatCatInASlatVat writes "Kurt Hanson's Radio Internet Newsletter has an analysis of the new royalty rates for Internet Radio announced by the US Copyright Office. The decision is likely to put most internet radio stations out of business by making the cost of broadcasting much higher than revenues. From the article: 'The Copyright Royalty Board is rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters and instead adopting the "per play" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange (a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA)...[The] math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues.'"

Comments

Re:surprised??? never...

[digitig]

Since when did placing the government in charge of collecting revenue automatically lead to censorship? The issue is not so much who does the collecting as who does the distributing.

Ok, name one single instance in which the current UK government has attempted to have "evil" music genres banned, or one single instance in which the current UK government has attempted to have music critical of it banned. Or, come to that, one single other act on its part that leads you to believe that giving it the authority to collect revenues from compulsorary licensing would inevitably lead to censorship. Individual MPs -- and indeed groups of MPs -- in the UK, in the Netherlands and in France, have called for restrictions on Rap. They have not succeeded yet, but it's enough to make me nervous. And the licensing act of 2003 has, as predicted by the Musicians Union, caused the widespread closure of folk clubs and live music sessions (just follow the sad litany of closures on uk.rec.music.folk). A lot of us on the folk scene suspect that the present Labour Party leadership remembers all too well how the folk clubs of the 1960s were a hotbed of left-wing dissent and fears that they could be again. The present UK government do seem determined to stamp out amateur music making; when the 2003 licensing act was being discussed, ministers consistently refused to acknowledge that there was any music making at all outside "the music industry"