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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.
Does this apply even to stations that run regular Radio over the airwaves? You'd think they wouldnt have to double pay since they already pay royalties for the initial broadcast. Using the internet as a form of delivery I would think would be no different than using a repeater to extend range and "rebroadcast". *shrug* definately sucks, but I'll stick with japan-a-radio :)
OOHHH, make the internet just go away ! Pleazze ! Let us return to the day that we owned the radio station, the promoters, the concert hall, and the bands. Our old reliable system of "screw the desperate band", play the music "via cocaine and cash incentives" on the radio, and "fill the concert halls we control with our band", ending with "selling you the authorized T shirt". I'll even toss in a contribution to the "home taping kills music" fund. Please make that nasty internet go away.
I'm also ready for higher payments!
That means I automatically get them, right?
What about offshore servers? Are you still liable to pay royalties if you're "broadcasting" from Israel or Sweden? Technically you'd be unicasting to your server, not broadcasting to an audience.
If you make hard for people that is willing to set up a legal Internet radio and make a profitable business of it, in the end, the only way to get internet music broadcast (and video, for all that matter) will be illegally, on P2P, FTP and whatnot.
But, on a second thought, that is exactly what the Media Cartel want. They don't matter where you are getting it, as long as the only way to be legally exposed to new content is through their channels. They couldn't care less if you and a couple of technologically wealthy people are going around their blockage, but they will do everything on their power to prevent both the average people and the *artists* to get in touch with each other without them.
This is not about giving people no options. It is about giving *artists* no option. People are attached to their favorite artists and will follow them wherever they go.
The DJ of my favorite internet radio stations, Radio Paradise, has a very informative blog concerning this issue.
Also, if you're interested in taking action, check out Save Net Radio.
The Buggles 2.0 # Streaming video killed the internet radio star #
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
If you had bothered to read the article, or the previous article two weeks ago when the decision was announced (I know, I know, this is slashdot), you would have found out that previously they paid royalties similar to that of airwave broadcasting based on tuning hours. The move to per song/per listener is a considerable change in the fee formula that will drive many smaller broadcasters out of business. Its interesting that if I own a bar with non-live music (juke box/radio) I pay per listening hour regardless of how many patrons are in the bar that particular night, but if it is the internet, I have to pay per ear.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
They were paying a fee. They actually could pay 1 of 2 fees, either a % of profit or a per-song fee. The dropping of the % profit fee structure is going to put most of the small e-radio stations out of business. The increase in the per-song fee is going to put most of the others out of business too.
Don't most Internet-Radio stations make no profit? You'd think artists would be thrilled to get the publicity. If they do make a profit off of the songs themselves, then pay them. But I don't think that is the case. Even traditional stations have to use paid advertising. Right?
Royalties for broadcasting over public airwaves, or on the Internet are a really dumb idea. The artist already got paid with the CD sale. The artist gets 'free' advertising.
Go on tour and make your money. Use CDs as promotional material.
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.
Maybe this is because they figured they could actually charge per person listening, which is the most fair way to charge when you think of it. With traditional radio, it is impossible to tell how many people are listening at any one time. With internet radio, it's extremely easy to tell how many people are listening, as least in terms of number of computers tuned in. Maybe the internet radio will just have to start putting on commercials like the FM stations do. Sure it makes the radio suck more, but somebody has to pay for the music.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Shouldn't they be paying more if they have a larger potential audience?
No, else by your logic, any song played on shortwave radio would have to account for a potential audience of 6+ billion people.
Many years ago, as a student rep at Boston U, we though about hiring a popular band for one of our student affairs. We were advised by several band managers that even tho we could afford the band (s) they would not play our, or any school. The reason was that if you played schools, the concert promoters (Boston, 1979-1983) would not hire you to play the big venues. This suddenly explained why once a band broke, you could never see them anywhere but the big arena. I agree that copy right holders are entitled to be paid for their work. What is happening here is more monopoly strongarming than copyright protection. The internet is the single greatest thing to happen to content since Gutenberg. Recall that prior to him, reading was kept to the Church and King...only elites could read...and they liked it that way.
The fees are based on audience already. They use marketing data to determine how many listeners listen to the FM station (advertisers care too, so if the station deflates figures they make less money from advertisers).
See my other comment, broadcast and internet radio pay the same ASCAP/BMI fees to the songwriters based on listener reach.
Internet radio ONLY (NOT terrestrial radio) has to pay a reproduction fee to the RIAA, because you sit at home all day recording songs off internet radio complete with cross-fades and announcer blurbs. They raised this 'reproduction' fee to very high levels and that's what will kill internet radio. What, you don't sit at home all day taping internet radio stations? Call congress and get this fixed.
Music publishers stand to make the most money.
This rule change is not about paying artists more money. It is about controlling concentrating profit channels. Internet radio allows independent and niche genre music a place to be heard and promoted. If these rule changes go into effect internet radio stations will see a ten fold increase in fees paid to rights organizations.
A few Music Publishers hold the vast amount of rights to music. They want nothing else than all the available bandwidth for broadcast to be dominated by titles in their catalogs. So they seek to raise fees across the board with one purpose. To shutdown alternative channels of music delivery. They want the control and the money. All of it. This is the only way they see to do that.
SOMA FM Internet radio including my personal favorite Indie Pop Rocks (found iTunes radio tuner) is threatened with huge increases and will likely be forced to close. That would simply be a tragedy.
Being a independent musician myself I know all too well the lengths that the industry has gone to crush people from making music on their own. They export money from venues and threaten litigation to club owners if they don't pay and return to a "cover band" formats. Or simply do away with live music. Some give up and leave the hassle of live music behind.
Once again taking away channel of exposure. Granted there always will be musicians willing to starve and scrape by, but you can only do that for so long...the old phrase "don't quit your day job" was at one point almost going away, but they are working hard to make sure they make the decisions about who listens to what when.
In the long run, this move by the RIAA is hurt its own interests. The current situation is actually pretty good for them. They're getting paid (though perhaps not as much as they would like), their music is reaching the ears of potential customers, and the broadcasts are at bitrates good enough to expose people to music while low enough nobody wants to fill their hard drive up with an archive of it.
So what are Internet radio listeners going to do if this succeeds? Sure, some might switch to a more RIAA-encouraged form of entertainment, but a lot will just change the station. Once the RIAA wipes out the stations promoting their music, that leaves the ones playing independent and international music. "Drive your customers to discover competitor's product" is generally not the missing "2. ???" step that leads to profit.
There IS advertising on NPR. You know the little "bumper" at the end of each package that goes:
Support for NPR comes from the following...
There's usually some commission, retailer, foundation, company, etc whose business is essentially getting a "plug" and for which they're probably making a much larger donation than $120 per year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I think that this ruling is a good idea, but in fairness, I can understand how they might be trying to lump NPR into the fold as well.
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.
I'm surprised that some enterprising country who doesn't give a frick about US laws and who wants western currency doesn't get into the "media business." Imagine if North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, or Cuba got opened their own internet radio and their own versions of AllofMP3? I'd think that would be a decent stream of revenue that would be hard or impossible to shut off.
I can just hear the copyright holders meeting now ....
"And our projections show that if we choke the goose hard enough we'll get more eggs."
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Anybody see a reason why this wouldn't work?
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
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
Here is a link to the petition to save internet radio. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/saveinternetrad io/
Please go sign it. The more people the better.
Sealand!
"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).
. .
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.
I, of course, didn't read all (115 pages of) the copyright board's actual statement from this month, but it seems like the $500 minimum-per-stream doesn't depend on whether the station uses ASCAP music or free (e.g. cc-licensed) music
"Radio Broadcasters propose that music-formatted stations pay a fee ranging from as little as $500 per annum for small stations in low revenue ranked markets to as much as $8,000 per annum for large stations in high revenue ranked markets"
The term "Creative Commons" is not grep'd in the document so I assume it didn't come up.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
If you stream, you owe the compulsory licensing- doesn't matter if you're streaming signed artists or not.
This is what they want. They don't want the venue to exist, so they'll get the government to tax the hell
out of it so it'll go away. I wouldn't mind helping my favorite internet stations pay the bill if I thought
that the money would go to the artists I listen to (All unsigned in the case of the stations- I like listening
to Celtic, Celtic Rock, and Renaissance Festival music on the streams. I don't listen to much else...) but
I know that this big spike in fees happens to go to the pockets of RIAA directly and then to the labels.
Not to the artists in question.
Not to someone who's at all a legitimate rights holder for the stuff in question.
Just to RIAA.
Tell me again WHY the radio stream providers have to do this?
They want this stuff off the air because they see themselves as being the gatekeepers of culture.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I am a former radio dj. I always wanted to have my own radio station. My dreams came true a little over a year ago when I started my very own Internet radio station. I have spent around $4500 dollars getting the station up and going. There are costs for music, automation and music scheduling software, computers, bandwidth, stream hosting, licensing fees not to mention the endless hours I spent putting it all together. I also did all the webpage creation and hosting myself which saved me quite a bit of money. I had originally hoped that I would at least be able to re-coup my original investment and get enough revenue to at least cover my expenses. After a little over a year of broadcasting, I have received $0 in donations and just $20 from website advertising revenue (google and amazon). I finally resigned to the fact I was never going to see my $4500 again and since that most of that was sunk costs, I would just continue paying the ongoing licensing/streaming fees so that I could continue playing the music I love for myself and the small number of listeners that also enjoy the station. I never expected to get rich off this thing. I did it for my love of the music and my passion for radio. Now if this decision is not reversed I'll just be forced to throw all my hard work and dreams into the toilet. Some of us aren't the greedy bastards we're being made out to be. We just love music.
You didn't read the ruling, did you?
I read it, and the panel that awarded the fees basically took the content industries' recommendations for the new fee structure verbatim, with only one exception (they also wanted a 25% add-on to the fee for any broadcast terminating at a mobile device). It's like two people going to a required mediator, and one party asking for $1000, and the other suggesting that they can afford $50, and the judge saying "$1000 sounds good to me!"
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Here's a nice form-letter, if you're not in a creative mood.
? alertid=9461656&content_dir=ua_congressorg&mailid= custom
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/alert/
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.