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Internet Radio In Danger of Extinction in United States
An anonymous reader passed us a link to a Forbes article discussing dire news for fans of Internet radio. Yesterday afternoon saw online broadcasters, everyone from giants like Clear Channel and National Public Radio to small-fry internet concerns, arguing their case before the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB). The CRB's March 2nd decision to increase the fees associated with online music broadcasting will have harsh repercussions for those who engage in the activity, the panel was told. "Under a previous arrangement, which expired at the end of 2005, broadcasters and online companies such as Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit could pay royalties based on estimates of how many songs were played over a given period of time, or a 'tuning hour,' as opposed to counting every single song ... [They] also asked the judges to clarify a $500 annual fee per broadcasting channel, saying that with some online companies offering many thousands of listening options, counting each one as a separate channel could lead to huge fees for online broadcasters." There was also a previous provision for smaller companies that allowed them to pay less, something the March 2 decision did away with; in the view of the royalty holders, advertising more than pays for these fees, and they're ready for higher payments.
time to ditch the music that RIAA owns, and only stream stuff that people want share.
I'm also ready for higher payments!
That means I automatically get them, right?
If they stop, the music labels will notice their profits dropping and will rebalance their royalty rates to something more reasonable.
You make the presumption that the labels want internet radio to succeede and their profits from internet radio to be maximized. What if what they really want is for internet radio to go away?
Why would they want to do this? Because right now the labels act as the gatekeepers to the radio. That is why musicians sign horrible contracts with them. You want a hit record, you need to get on the radio. You want to get on the radio, you need to sign with a big label. If internet radio takes off, suddenly you'll have new outlets which the labels don't control. In the long run, maintaining this control is more important then any profits they might make of internet radio.
This is a slippery slope. I think that while on the surface, Internet radio and traditional, terrestrial, broadcast radio seem like the same thing, they've got some pretty significant differences. Obviously, terrestrial radio has a much larger share of the listeners. That is, while LOTS of people listen to Internet Radio, there are exponentially more Internet Radio "Stations" than there are terrestrial radio stations. Thus, the likelihood of 400,000 people listening to 1 terrestrial radio station (and thus being exposed to their advertising) is much higher than the same amount of people listening to the same Internet Radio Station. While not implausible that someone with a little money and marketing savvy might be able to make a dent with an Internet Radio Station, it hasn't happened yet.
That said, I think to apply the same (or at least similar) royalty fees to these Internet Radio Stations is pretty unfair. As a composer and a musician, I despise that I have to agree with Clear Channel on this one, because I think that they are RUINING terrestrial radio if in fact they haven't ruined it already. I side with Internet Radio as an artist because it is exactly the freedom from some of the industry regulation that makes it possible for someone without Warner Brothers or Sony behind him/her to get exposure. There's no friggin' way I'm going to get my music played/heard on a Clear Channel station or in a Warner Brothers movie soundtrack without EVERYBODY getting a piece of the pie. On the other hand, if I find a niche Internet Radio Station, I can submit my stuff and get it heard by a smaller, but hopefully more targeted audience and perhaps eventually generate some revenue from licensing deals with them or CD sales.
I guess my point is, while it would be easy to jump on the bandwagon as an artist and hope for the "big score" of more royalties, doing so would choke the "small time" Internet Radio Stations and make it once again a field of only "heavy hitters" with whom I stand little chance of getting heard. It may seem counterintuitive to some, but I think keeping things affordable with regard to royalties is exactly what's making it fertile ground for emerging artists and what's keeping Internet Radio a viable alternative for people looking for something more diverse and different than traditional radio.
We need to get left behind to shake up our policy makers. After a decade of stupid laws that kill innovation in this country, and start an economic recession, maybe people will wake up to the fact that conservative candidates and ideas need to be tossed out. You can not have progress without change. Conservatives, by nature and definition, resist change.
Innovation killing patents, overly-restrictive copyright, anti-science and anti-education political agendas, trade barriers.....all the right ingredients to kill our economy.
Maybe after a decade of being the "world-losers" joe-sixpack will figure out that new leadership is needed....and maybe voting only pro-choice or pro-life is too simplistic a strategy to keep our country competitive with the rest of the world.
-ted
"Anyone who has bought CDs knows each CD is engineered to have 2-3 good tracks and the rest as mediocre filler songs."
Perhaps that has been your experience. Mine has been considerably different. I've currently got about 600 "real" CD's (I did a purge about 10 years ago, otherwise it'd be about 1000), and I'm willing to wager that, on at least three quarters of these albums, more than half of the tracks are much better than mediocre.
Then again, I don't buy CD's willy-nilly just because I heard one song I liked on the radio. Look hard enough and you find thirty second clips for nearly all albums somewhere online.
You might buy crap albums, but just because you do doesn't mean all albums are "engineered" that way. Like there's a group out there that tells bands, "Okay, now, we're up to three good songs - radio engineering standards dictate that you half-ass it for the rest of the tracks."
If everyone is only buying the songs they like, it sends a drastic message: We won't pay for crap. Instead of an artist releasing 20 tracks a year, they could release half a dozen extremely high quality, worthwhile songs, and hopefully make the same -- or more -- revenue (since they don't need to make 11 filler tracks).
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It is good that you can purchase just the songs that you feel are 'the good ones' but it is a double edged sword. You never get exposed to those 'other songs' that never got any radio play that you still love.
I still hope that there is a massive enough shift in the market that a serious mainstream alternative to the RIAA evolves. When they become enough of a monopoly that they can stop caring about the customer or their suppliers (artists) they need to be slapped back into reality.