Slashdot Mirror
Net Radio Appeal On Royalties Rejected
Station writes "The Copyright Royalty Board has rejected a request to reconsider its March decision to impose an onerous royalty schedule on Internet radio broadcasters. '"None of the moving parties have [sic] made a sufficient showing of new evidence or clear error or manifest injustice that would warrant rehearing," wrote the CRB in its decision.' The recording industry and its royalty collection organization SoundExchange are jubilant over the ruling. '"Our artists and labels look forward to working with the Internet radio industry — large and small, commercial and noncommercial — so that together we can ensure it succeeds as a place where great music is available to music lovers of all genres," said SoundExchange head Simson in a statement. Noble words, but after today's ruling — which will take effect on May 15 unless the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agrees to hear an appeal — there probably won't be much of an Internet radio industry left for SoundExchange to work with.'"
then read this: http://www.savethestreams.org/serendipity/pages/fa q.html
As a former musician, songwriter, and label owner, I relied on getting paid through performance, mechanical, synchronization, and transcription royalties. It was a regular, dependable revenue stream.
But I've gotten so dependent on internet audio streams like Soma-FM's Indie Pop Rocks. Sometimes, it was the only thing keeping me going when I was working my dead end IT job. I'd have the shortcut to the 128kb stream on my desktop and it was the first thing I'd hit, even before checking my e-mail.
When I heard a song I really liked, I'd write down the name on a notepad, check the artist's site to see if an mp3 was available and if not I'd get it from iTMS. Just like radio, internet streams drive sales.
I had thought that ASCAP and BMI (the performing rights organizations that collect and disburse performance royalties) based royalty rates based on a radio or television station's potential audience, but it seems more complex than that, seeing as the Library of Congress is setting basic rates.
Tomorrow, I intend to research this issue and write my congressman (Rep. Delahunt) and senators (Sen. Kerry and Sen. Kennedy) and ask them to look into this issue. I urge everyone who is a constituent of a senator on the telecommunications subcommittee to do the same:
Conrad Burns, MT, Chairman
Ted Stevens, AK (don't mention those "tubes", okay?)
Trent Lott, MS
Kay Bailey Hutchison, TX
Olympia J. Snowe, ME
Sam Brownback, KS
Gordon Smith, OR
Peter G. Fitzgerald, IL
John Ensign, NV
George Allen, VA
John Sununu, NH
Ernest Hollings, SC, Ranking
Daniel K. Inouye, HI
John D. Rockefeller, WV
John F. Kerry, MA
John Breaux, LA
Byron Dorgan, ND
Ron Wyden, OR
Barbara Boxer, CA
Bill Nelson, FL
Maria Cantwell, WA
E-mail and faxes will probably be better received than snail mail, given the fact that mail to government offices gets delayed while it gets irradiated to ameliorate biological threats.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I guess the official Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee web site is out of date. It was only after I posted this that I realized that Sen. Burns (R-MT) lost to John Tester and George "Macaca" Allen (R-VA) lost to James Webb.
Pretty fucking Web 0.9 if you ask me.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Complain to the government. Write your congressmen and your senators, state and national, and let them know what this means. Then tell your non-geek friends and let them get pissed off too.
Sometimes its hard to believe that companies can get away with things like this, but when it comes to technology most of the country doesn't care enough to come to places like slashdot. Today I was talking to a friend about the evils of DRM, and I mentioned the Sony Rootkit incident and she had never heard of it (and she's not just someone off the street, she's an administrator at a website development/hosting company). If most of the country doesn't know about an issue, its easier to get away with it.
Pandora has a link in their blog to a petition thats been set up, so tell your friends, pass around the link, and use the information on the site to contact your own representatives.
tedivm
That specific royalty is only because "HD Radio" isn't a generic standard that anyone can use, but is instead a proprietary format that iBiquity licenses out to people. There are other digital radio formats that don't have to pay this fee.
You're mistaken. Internet radio is transmitting highly compressed copies that usually sound only marginally better than a cassette tape. It is digital in format, but that does not mean that it is of superior quality. There is a reason why the digital format on a CD is about 40 MB per song and an MP3 of the same exact song is about 4 MB. The quality is lower. If they were streaming some lossless format then maybe it would be a concern. The bandwidth costs alone would drive all but the largest webcasters out of business. A cassette tape recorded off of a strong FM station probably sounds better than most internet streams. This is not about digging money out of a new business. This is about shutting down a new business that threatens the vertical integration of the old business. If people have un-restricted access to new artists and music it becomes more difficult for the labels to force-feed their crap down our throats. This will drive everyone out of webcasting...except for ClearChannel and maybe AOL. Their precious business model secure until someone figures out how to bit-torrent radio streams. (Actually Octoshape is already doing that more or less)
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
Just received, and followed, this e-mail today. I encourage everyone to do the same, as it will send e-mails out to your local representative(s) in the house and senate. I quote:
? alertid=9631541
Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,
I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.
In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.
Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/
Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.
Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.
I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.
As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
Another generation, born from fire.
Great point! You should really mention it to the Copyright Royalty Board, as they have now rejected that line of reasoning twice when it came from the Internet radio stations.
In case you haven't been keeping up with the story, here's the quick summary: Internet radio has to pay two sets of royalties, while traditional radio only pays one. Thanks to the recent ruling by the CRB, that extra royalty that Internet radio pays will skyrocket over the next few years, dealing Internet radio a mortal blow.
And yes, you're right, it makes no sense.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Actually it is: http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/
I got the mail too, but all I had to find it on the website was click the "Blog" link at the bottom on the page.
Well, since English doesn't have polypersonal agreement and the subject of the sentence is "none," the verb should be singular. "None of you has taken out the trash" would be the proper construction of that sentence, and not "none...have." This is the same process that creates "has anyone finished his homework?" and why "has anyone finished their homework?" is malformed for some overly prescriptivist types. Since the OED accepts (and has used for centuries) 'their' as both a singular and plural pronoun (singular when referring to an individual of indeterminate gender; plural when referring to a group possessive), this latter "pluralization" is actually correct. Unfortunately, people see that "anyone...their" is plural and jump to conclusions that any of the "-one" pronouns can be pluralized in sentences. This is not the case.
This is also immediately clear if you look at the word "none"--it's a portmanteau of "no one" or "not one" just like many other English contractions.
Because the royalties don't just go to the composer, they also go to the performers. There will be copyright on the recording of the performance, and the holder of that copyright will profit from royalties.
Given the enormous expense of producing classical music verses popular music, that's not so bad. The vast majority of the expenses associated with popular music are tied up in promotion. Full orchestral pieces need a huge soundstage, require you to pay a large number of highly trained people, need extensive rehearsal beforehand, etc. A record by Ms Spears just requires her to squawk into a mic in a quiet room for a bit and the geek with the autotuner to put in an all-nighter. I have no arguments with paying the relatively modest premiums for a superior product.
I find this ruling a shame though. The comments by the industry body that they are excited to be enabling the internet radio industry are such bullshit. They are secretly peeing their pants with glee that they managed to kill off a source of virtually free, high quality digital music, because without it, listeners will obviously be more inclined to spend some money.
For commercial and for larger non-commercial webcasters the judges set a pay-per-play rate of:
$.0008 per play for 2006
$.0011 per play for 2007
$.0014 per play for 2008
$.0018 per play for 2009
$.0019 per play for 2010
Per Play means the following:
Any time ONE listener hears ONE song (or any portion of a song), that's a "performance." If ONE listener hears ten songs, that's TEN performances. If 1000 listeners hear ten songs, that's 10,000 performances.
So what will the internet radio stations have to pay?
Here's a calculation:
$0.0008 X 10,000 listeners X 16 songs/hr. = $128. It'll cost our imaginary webcaster $128 to play one hour of music for 10,000 people.
At the end of the day, that's $3,072 ($128 X 24 hrs./day) -- for just a single day! After a week goes by, it's $21,504 ($3,072 X 7 days/wk.).
And for all of 2006, this webcaster with a steady average audience of 10,000 listeners would owe $1,121,280!! (the $3,072 X 365 days/yr.)
That takes care of 2006. For 2007, the rate increases 37.5%! So, with no audience growth, the cost of streaming music for the year would increase to $1,541,760.
And the royalty rate goes up another 28% in 2008, and another 28% in 2009, topping out at a $.0019 per performance rate in 2010 (resulting in a royalty obligation of $2,663,040 for that same audience averaging 10,000 listeners) for that year.
Information taken from www.savethestreams.org.
"Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market"
Matthew J. Salganik, Peter S. Dodds, and Duncan J. Watts.
Science, 311:854-856, 2006.
Abstract: Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful
than average, suggesting that "the best" alternatives are qualitatively
different from "the rest"; yet experts routinely fail to predict which
products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by
creating an artificial "music market" in which 14,341 participants
downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of
previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social
influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success.
Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs
rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result
was possible.