NPR Takes First Step To Fight Internet Royalties

jmcharry sent in an article that opens, "After the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decided to drastically increase the royalties paid to musicians and record labels for streaming songs online, National Public Radio (NPR) will begin fighting the decision on Friday, March 16 by filing a petition for reconsideration with the CRB panel."

Comments

Re:Higher prices

[CapnRob]

No, it means that your NPR station will be charged $120,000 a year to stream their broadcasts, when they're charged $20,000 for over-the-air broadcasting. But thanks for playing.

There's Public, and then there's Public

[Kelson]

Actually, NPR doesn't get much public money:

NPR supports its operations through a combination of membership dues and programming fees from over 800 independent radio stations, sponsorship from private foundations and corporations, and revenue from the sales of transcripts, books, CDs, and merchandise. A very small percentage -- between one percent to two percent of NPR's annual budget -- comes from competitive grants sought by NPR from federally funded organizations, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. (emphasis added)

As for the stations themselves:

On average, public radio stations (including NPR Member stations) receive the largest percentage of their revenue (34%) from listener support, 24% from corporate underwriting and foundations, and 13% from CPB allocations.

National Public Radio is public in the sense of being a public service, not in the sense of being primarily funded by tax dollars.

Re:Is that math correct?

[lowerlogic]

thats $0.0008 per song _per listener_. For example, if you have, say, 10,000 listeners, you pay about $1 million a year:
10,000 listeners * $0.0008 * 15 songs/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year= $1,051,200.00 a year

Re:Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it?

[fermion]

While I in no way want to denigrate the importance of the right of a person to broadcast the latest cocktail recipe to 10 of his or her closest friends, and in fact feel that low power radio stations are a basic means of insuring that the public airwaves remain public, the villain in this story is not NPR or any other volunteer run donation funded radio stations. By definition, these donations funded radio stations serve the people, because the people care enough to actually donate funds and time to these stations, as opposed to commercial stations that which may serve no public purpose, or a LPFm station which may only serve the purpose of a single person.

The reason that we do not have room for LPFM stations is that the FCC over-licensed the commercial bandwidth, and did not leave enough in reserve for station that verifiably serve a public purpose. The commercial stations then managed to frame the argument so that the public would complain not about the over-licensing of redundant commercial interests, but about the public stations enacting a protectionist stand. The public stations have to be protectionist. No one is threatening to remove a commercial license, and most commercial stations can afford to increase their power. In fact, by putting forth such a arguments one is effect lobbying for the pure commercialization of the airwaves, leaving no room for public radio, much less LPFM.

The issue is greater than LPFM, greater than NPR, greater than Pacifca, greater than the ACN or whatever your favorite Christian network is. Such stations have limited funds and loads of enemies. On a crowded dial, it would be all too easy to create a network of LPFM transmitters that would block the signals of such public stations. Again, I am not saying that NPR is correct in it's actions. I am not generating a scary scenario so to use fear to move people to my position. All I am saying is that the dial is crowded. In some places, there is a scant half megahertz between stations. In some markets a single entity owns much of the commercial licenses. In some markets, the exact same single is broadcast over multiple commercial stations. There is enough bandwidth available for public, commercial, semi-commercial, and LPFM. The problem is that FCC does not take the public airwaves seriously, and allows the private corporations to do whatever they like. Then the private corporations have enough media access so that people believe that it is the public radio fault.