Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio
ISurfTooMuch writes "With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"
What No "All your base RIAA belong to us" comments?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Does anybody feel like this is the begining of the fall of the RIAA? They seem to be getting more and more desperate to justify their actions, which are progressivly getting crazier and crazier. Pretty soon they'll be linking internet radio to terrorism, and claiming the internet news media (ie slashdot) is conspiring against them. It's not like I have any pity for them. It's faily obvious they shot themselves in the foot at this point. They didn't see P2P as pandora's box and figured if they shut down Napster it would all go away. Of course something easier to use came along (Kazaa), and when they finally crippled kazaa to the point of it being useless bittorrent became popular. Now instead of a service where downloading an album is quite the tast we now have a service where downloading an entire discography is as easy as getting a single song. I also doubt the RIAAs claim that piracy has crippled the music industry. It seems that with the internet and P2P "sharing" more people are starting to listen to more diverse music including independant lables, and artists. Ask any small/inderpendant lable if they've been suffering any over the last 5 years and most will tell you that their doing better than ever. It seems that the music industry as a whole isn't doing bad at all, but much of the focus has shifted away from a few popular artists and moved towards a wide variety of independant artists which music industry fat cats hate due to the fact they need to keep more artists on their lable instead of feeding off of 3 or 4 popular bands.