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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."
Does this mean that a song will cost $0.06 instead of $0.05 at allofmp3.com?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Funny NPR should be speaking up for the little guy now. They were the ones who in 2000 put the nails in the coffin of low-power community FM broadcasting by joining forces with the NAB to lobby Congress. (References a gogo).
NPR's only interested now that commercial radio is about to shut down their streaming operations (which are far more popular than commercial simulcast streams). Pardon me if I fail to shed a tear for NPR this time around, even if I also reject the CRB's new webcasting royalty rates.
NPR, you'll never see a fucking dime from me until you stand up for real community radio and reverse your stand on LPFM. I used to be a regular contributor to local public radio stations before your shameless whoring in 2000.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I guess CmdrTaco got hit with a royalty request, because I got "Nothing to see here..."
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
that someone with public interest is starting to yell. I listen to Internet radio only these days. I'm not wanting the RIAA to send me letters of any kind, and standard radio SUCKS thanks to corporate radio. I support the stations that I listen to because the play the music I like, music that I cannot hear on broadcast radio. Now, the RIAA wants to put the only source of music that is worth listening to out of business??? WTF! Broadcast radio will end up being ALL talk radio.
I hope that this brings the whole thing to public attention in a way that is bad for the RIAA in general. This stranglehold that they have on music distribution will end up killing the music business as we have known it. Perhaps that is a good thing, I don't know, but I can say that from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to see the RIAA legally squeezed for monopolistic practices somehow. Yes, I know its not likely, but they do need slapped down hard.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Man, no kidding. How are they going to spread the increased costs to all six of their listeners?! That will suck for them.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
If you think that NPR is on the right, your head would explode watching FOX.
NPR is very much to the left. Don't get mad at "Morning Edition" for covering the White House just because it happens to have a Republican in it. When the president farts, it's still news.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's not like they are profiting from playing the songs. They're funded with public money already, so the payments for these royalties are going straight from our tax dollars to the music labels. Congress should just exempt them from royalty payments altogether via legislation--problem solved. In fact that would be a net win for taxpayers, since we'd get the same public service at a lower cost.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Internet stations that stream almost completely music are being saddled with outrageously usurious fees.
Soma FM predicts their fees will rise from $20,000 today to $600,000 for 2006, and $1,000,000 in 2007.
Loosing stations like Soma would suck. I listen to a little bit of normal broadcast radio (usually just the urban hit station to pick up the occasional deserving top 20 hit), but otherwise its internet only.
NPR has essentially stopped all investigative reporting, as far as I can tell. They mostly read press releases for about a half an hour and then repeat the process.
And I was almost embarassed by the judges so clearly fellating the content industries' expert (Dr. Pelcovits) over his testimony. They took his (bought and paid for) recommendations hook, line and sinker. The only thing the content folks didn't get was a 25% premium on content sent to "wireless" users (they must be friends with Verizon), and then only because the expert didn't suggest that there was sufficient marketplace forces to determine the extent of premium that should be applied to portable devices. The judges repeatedly called bullshit on practically evey point of the webcaster's expert. Maybe they needed a better expert than this Adam Jaffe, or perhaps just someone more persuasive - say, someone with tickets to the final 4, an available hunting lodge, and a few cases of single malt.
I'm a bit surprised that there was little to no discussion concerning the relative changes in the fee structure - and that the content industry basically got every cent they asked for (except the 25%).
I don't know the players, but I'd say that there was some pretty significant bias in the panel before the parties even began to talk.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
As to NPR being to the left, I think that they present a pretty balanced coverage of the news. If anything they cater to a younger audience than CNN and Fox and I think that a lot of the leftist criticism comes from not so much from a political slant but from a generational slant. The style of news and reporting that is geared towards the 45 and under crowd may seem to have a liberal bias not so much from the content but from the tone.
Following the money on this one does not lead straight to the RIAA. The people who are threatened by internet radio are the traditional FM broadcasters and now Sirius and XM in the satellite radio industry.
FM is fueled by big corporate advertising dollars and payola.
Satellite radio is fueled by subscriptions.
Internet radio has a mix of the above and an abundance of free stations sponsored voluntarily by their listeners. Now close your eyes and imagine a world where every car is able to connect to internet radio. The brews big trouble for the traditional and satellite broadcasters.
Having NPR step up to this is good news indeed - while NPR is faaaar from a perfect organization this move certainly wins then some brownie points with me.
LPFM stations were to be held to the exact same technical standards re: interference as (IRONY ALERT) the very same low-power translator stations used by NPR affiliates to repeat their own signals. The difference is that LPFM stations were allowed to originate content, rather than simply retransmit it. I don't see how NPR could raise the interference issue in earnest. No - this was about competition for donation dollars.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I've only donated to public radio for vanity promotional statements since they received the $200 million Kroc bequest to their endowment fund. I'm not a finance expert, but at some point their costs should be completely covered by their endowment annuities. So many charities are in much greater need.
sigfault (core dumped)
this law doesn't just affect over the air radio stations, but all streaming web casts. this is a bad deal, and it is supposed to be applied retro actively to 2006 (which will basically put all streaming radio stations out of business).
you can write your congressman or representative here.
for more info on how this will affect streaming radio, check out www.SaveOurInternetRadio.com. i found out about this through soma fm's news section (soma fm is an internet radio station i listen to, i am not affiliated with them)
They do really, really try to be balanced. But their underlying beliefs poke through. Terry Gross is a good example - she's only a really good, hard-hitting interviewer when her guest is someone that she has an ideological disagreement with. She's not very good when someone like Al Franken comes on - it just turns into a love-fest.
I still prefer NPR to most of the alternative, and really only stray from it when they have the beg-a-thon going on, or when they are doing a 20-minute piece on a harmonica player from Bangladesh.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You have no clue how bad NPR can get. I live Mississippi where anything with the prefix "public" gets accused of being a part of a leftist conspiracy. The funding here for NPR is SO bad (how bad is it?) they once had a drive time that lasted a month and a half! I would LOVE for the NPR stations here to switch to an all talk format, it sure beats the hell out of the crappy public domain classical that they play here. This is incredibly sad since it was Mississippi Public Broadcasting(MPB) that aired non-stop vital information when Katrina hit--even when their own headquarters was being hit! American Family Radio didn't even do that and they're based way in the north of the state that got a little wind for Katrina. I've talked face-to-face with the director of MPB as she is my neighbor, and she is not an idiot. She's a very capable and dedicated person, but Mississippians are clueless.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
As for it being left, just about every international news source outside of the USA looks that way in comparison to CNN et al - I still can't forgive them using file film of Palestinians celebrating a soccer win on the night of Sept 11 and pretending it was film of them celebrating the mass murder - lazy journalism and incitement to riot thrown together.
1) Pass law declaring all musicians are Public Servants
2) Stop paying creators and workers
3) Profit!
Interesting suggestion, but I'd rather see...
1) Halt misappropriation of taxpayer monies
2) Defund government funded political propaganda
3) Freedom!
Thanks for the offer, but I can decide whom I pay for news and music, without instituting your nanny-state to run my entire life.
Actually, NPR doesn't get much public money:
As for the stations themselves:
National Public Radio is public in the sense of being a public service, not in the sense of being primarily funded by tax dollars.
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
Well, that would be a lot of streams still. The article says they have three.
It was pointed out above that those fees are per listener, something I didn't see in the original article.
As Emily Latella would say: "Oh. That's quite different. Never Mind."
NPR has been on a downhill slope ever since certain parties decided to put a political appointee as its head rather than a more neutral candidate. Just as John Bolton was appointed to be the US ambasador to the UN despite his dislike of the organization, NPR's current head is doing damage in much the same way due to his own political allegiances.
My question is, can a station not play the music these licenses cover? Kinda like "podsafe" music. Maybe it's time for NPR to start using Creative Commons music exclusively. If enough do it, artist will begin to release more under CC licenses.
The new streaming royalty rates don't increase the royalties paid to musicians and record labels, they just increase the royalties collected from streamers. The RIAA (ie SoundScan, and predecessors/competitors BMI & ASCAP) have never paid all of the collected royalties to its rightful owners. Instead, the collection agencies keep it for themselves. I hope you're not surprised.
So it's excellent news that NPR is fighting this move. I hope NPR's entry also encourages other well-positioned orgs to complain. These new rates completely eliminate hobbyist and personal streaming to friends, by keeping the $500 per year minimum fee that is now equal to the per-play fee for supporting many dozens of simultaneous listeners. That minimum should be totally discarded, even more important than lowering the arbitrarily high (but still somewhat affordable, until it rises again over the next couple/few years) per-play rates that also squeeze out noncommercial and small commercial webcasters.
--
make install -not war
Um, what the hell are you talking about? Not only is she not a lesbian, she's married for fuck's sake.
I'd love to listen to NPR more often, but it really just makes me want to take a nap. Too much new-age crap. And, really, I feel about the same listening to NPR as I feel when I'm forced to watch Bill O'Reilly. Perhaps not quite that bad. But they do replay the same content countless times until you've nearly memorized every word. And as worldly as I would like to be, I really don't care about organic wall-paper makers in a remote Irish village that are saving their money to refurbish the town well. Or, on the flip side, twenty-five minute audio interviews with some British guy that dresses like Captain Picard and built his house to look like the Enterprise from Next Generation.
I know a lot of people claim to listen to NPR, but I think the number that claim to far outweighs the number who actually do. The only time I've actually heard someone listening to it was in the occasional taxi cab.
On the other hand public radio broadcasting is far superior to public television broadcasting. I haven't watched PBS in a very long time, but all they ever had were pledge drives, documentaries about lesbians who swear a lot, hunting shows and round tables of women talking about current events. Oh, and of course all of the outdated BBC content that was three decades old (except for good stuff like Doctor Who, which they stopped broadcasting).
Really, I think public broadcasting in all manner has outlived its purpose. Especially with the internet. Hell, I can get the BBC content directly. Why do I need to get it filtered through a poorly-structured PBS broadcast at additional expense?
The only truly great thing I can say about NPR is that they present their content without the brain-numbing, stupifying, insultingly ADHD-oriented flash-bang, shock-and-awe presentation of other news outlets.
What is "left" or "right" very much depends on where you stand. The problem with comments like this one is that what gets called "left" in the United States would count as some form of "right" in most other places in the world.
Want proof? Think about the last time you turned the dial to the socialist, communist, anarchist media outlets? Oh, yeah, that's right - those outlet's don't exist in the United States. You think that happened by accident?
Further, some people have done an analysis of NPR's guest list that stated the following:
Not only is it biased toward "official sources" and "corporations", it is sexist as well:
and you know what, I will get mad when NPR covers the White House and favors official sources. Why? Because their mandate was specifically to be an alternative to commercial media that would "promote personal growth rather than corporate gain" and "speak with many voices, many dialects." In terms of accomplishing that, it is a miserable failure.FTFA: "The suggested new rates would increase to $.0008 per-play for 2006 (retroactively), $.0011 for 2007, $.0014 in 2008, $.0018 in 2009 and $.0019 for 2010"
Okay, so if we figure each time you play a song you owe $0.002 (rounding up for easy numbers), and on average you play 10 songs an hour (average 4 minutes each with 20 minutes for commercials/station ID), you're paying $0.02/hour. Over the entire day (and night) $0.48. Over an entire year $170.88... So how do they get from $170.88 to $120,000 (or the millions that some stations are claiming)?
I'm not saying anyone is lying about the cost, I just don't see how the costs are being calculated, anyone care to explain?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs