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60-Day Reprieve For Internet Royalty Rate Hike
Chickan writes "The Copyright Royalty Board has officially posted its ruling on Internet royalty rates in the Federal Register. However, the organization has pushed back the due date for royalty payments to kick in from May 15 to July 15. The publication of this information also begins the official 30-day period for appeals. NPR is slated to file an appeal in this timeframe."
Who shot who in the when what now?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If the appeal doesn't take hold, all the little guys will be forced out and the majority of stations will play NOT ONLY tons of advertisements, but also only popular music that brings mainstream listeners.
If they base it on PROFIT gained by advertisements, rather than per song, per user... it will GREATLY improve the chances of smaller bands to be recognized. The only people benefitting are those grabbing the cash, and the already popular musicians and stations... the little guy will get pushed out.
The majority of stations online aren't even making a lot of money, rather than entertaining a specific genre of music.
Please, write your senators.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
This whole thing is disgusting.
But I have a question about the retroactive part. It seems that not only will stations have to pay more in the future, but they have to pay more for the past year or so. How is that legal? Also, does anyone know how it would be enforced? If a station just shuts down and doesn't pay for the past year, then what?
I work at a volunteer run radio station in CT. One of our DJs also runs an internet radio station with several volunteer DJs as well. He has to shut down due to this rate hike. He said it went from about 700 dollars a year to 15g a year.
....61 days for those of you using the modern Gregorian Calender.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
Go here to protest this bullcrap.
u-bend
If recording artists are smart, they'll contract congress to support the small internet radio stations and a reasonable fee structure.
If Internet radio is turned into the playground for rich corporations, they'll be locked into the RIAA for the foreseeable future. Who benefits from that?
How about instead of rejecting the eventual return of royalties, we "support it", but keep extending the future date when they are supposed to start applying?
You know, like Disney always seems to manage with copyright expiration.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Can't Internet radio stations just simply refuse to play RIAA music then? This would be great. We'd get stations full of independent artists and labels. I want to see billboard music disappear with what they're doing. They're trying to cripple and control the Internet instead of working with it. They need to learn that this will only lead to their downfall.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
I really, really hope the Internet Radio Equality Act will go through ASAP for this, or it'll likely become a devastating blow to most serious Internet radio stations out there. :-/
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
i'm not sure i fully understand.. does this only pertain to radio stations streaming, or any streaming? i do not see how this could effect say.. Shoutcast.
Yes it is very lame, and the only way to fix it is headshots of RIAA VPs..
Butt technology will just move around it.. this will not stop small time artists from broadcasting on other mediums.
The **AAz are just pushing away more consumers.. & So be it. As long as they are part of there own downward spiral this can almost be seen as a good thing.
Kill your TV
Congress needs to smack the shit out of the Copyright Board for this stunt. As in abolish them entirely and make the payment returns retroactive. And to revoke laws that help entertainment monopolies like the RIAA. That'd be sweet justice AND help America by revoking needless laws AND give consumers more choice. The only loser would be the RIAA.
Can't Internet radio stations just simply refuse to play RIAA music then?
Through SoundExchange, they'll still collect from the Internet radio stations anyway.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Local DJ-driven radio is all but dead at this point anyway. The idea of using radio to actually engage listeners, as opposed to playing a rather fixed set list of "hits", is something most stations have given up on. Up here, the Detroit NPR affiliate, WDET, went so far as to eliminate most of its music programming (including the phenomenal Alternate Take, hosted by Liz Copeland, and some legendary jazz shows that have been staples for that community) in favor of becoming a clone of another NPR affiliate that we already receive in the same area.
Radio and the larger music labels have given up their role as taste-makers in lieu of pandering to more conservative audience taste. A local DJ can afford to challenge you. A large multi-station enterprise has little choice but to play it safe. Even the satellite radio stations have woefully "safe" playlists, for all the chatter about endless choice.
I dare say most people reading slashdot gave up on the idea of finding new music on the radio a while ago - and the rest of the public is only half a step behind. The unfortunate consequence will be the larger record labels and the multi-station radio networks are going to fight technology tooth and nail for a fight they already gave up on twenty years ago.
Payola used to be a scandal. Now it's merely a business model.
I think this is the killer app for finally getting your ISP to join the mbone. After all, mcasting a stream you have no way of tracking how many listeners you have. So when it comes time to pay soundexchange based on #listeners, well 0*0.0011 = $0.00 Sure it would be hard to calculate advertiser revenue, but I am sure there would be a way around it. It really is too bad that mcast is usually the last feature that your ISP will add, well next to IPv6.
I'd give anything to have some of that bratwurst.
Pandora is being forced to block non-US listeners.
From the article:
You have to wonder how much longer the RIAA will get away with its ignorance and greed.
Maybe I'm nutty, but would it be possible for an Internet broadcaster to switch to some sort of submission-based format? In that way, artists can submit their own work to the station. Through this process they'd not only hook their submissions to the info on where to send the royalty check (bypassing the RIAA/Soundexchange scam) but also agree to some actually sane royalty rate, terms-of-service style. On an Internet where MySpace, MP3.com, and the like are full of people who are already putting tracks out there for free, where countless bands with their own actual websites are paying hosting fees out of their pockets to put their free downloads out there, and where most of these people would love the chance to get themselves heard on popular Internet radio stations, it seems to me a broadcaster could build up a respectable playlist in this manner.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If this legislation passes then small independent internet radio stations will be unable to pay the fees and therefor immediately go off the air. This is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. I can say for a fact that 80% of the new music I have bought in the last 12 months has been because I heard it on an internet radio station. For more information and some great music check out http://somafm.com/crb/ They have helpful information on how to contact your local Congressman and tell him/her that you do not support this act.
So Say We All
Oh, thank you o merciful masters. Promise you won't kill me while I'm picking up the crumbs? We are a kinky bunch when it comes to these people. We like to be handcuffed to the bedposts while they do their dirty business. Oooo baby...Here's my money...punish me more...
"Hit me with your rhythm stick
Hit me, hit me
Je t'adore, ich leibe dich
Hit me, hit me, hit me
Hit me with your rhythm stick
Hit me slowly, hit me quick
Hit me, hit me, hit me"
What?
The corporate studios don't sign that many artists and (according to a Chicago Tribune article I read some years ago) a lot of the artists they sign are indebted to the label for many albums. So long before the listener gets any chance to hear the artist, the label has them under their thumb. The RIAA's legal antics against listeners (often bringing cases before researching evidence against them) is covered here on /.. I'm left to wonder why I should write anyone in support of making it easier to help these labels by making it more likely that their music will be played.
I'm left to think that we should let them raise the rates as high as they think the market will bear. I'd rather work with artists who license their recordings to me so that I may non-commercially share them verbatim with others in any medium. I stopped listening to radio (online and over the air) because what I was hearing is only the "popular music that brings mainstream listeners" (in other words, as far as I can hear that's what they're playing now before any new fee schedule). This is not what I want to hear. Often the online stations I heard were merely retransmissions of what was being played over the air.
Contrary to what FreePress.net is claiming in their emails, I don't believe this means the end of Internet radio. I think it means the end of RIAA tracks on Internet radio and it opens the way for unsigned artists and tracks from labels that don't screw the artist (like Magnatune).
Digital Citizen
At some point this knee-jerk "they're all crooks" stuff becomes self-defeating. The worst of the crooks push this notion hard because it essentially lets them off the hook for what they've done, and it simultaneously casts doubt on any reformer who is not a crook, or is a lesser crook. In this case there is something concrete to point to; we're not talking about a bill that hasn't been drafted yet. http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Ari has a blog entry about being forced to shut down free streams of di.fm and sky.fm and what you can do to try to avoid it.
Napster was *bad* until they figured out how to do the same thing and take their cut, but what of the artist? How much of the money went to the maker of the product vs. corporations seeking to make the most of their positions as middle men?
I think that the players of the internet industry are every bit as big as the corporations represented by the RIAA. I think Amazon, AOL Music, Walmart, MSN, etc should get together with terrestrial and internet radio and create (or facilitate the creation of) independent labels along the model of book authorship where the music creator KEEPS his/her copyright and s/he or his/her agent sets up an arrangement where they each take a negotiated percentage of sales.
It wouldn't be long before they'd sign artists away from the conventional labels. Prince for instance has released music on the internet and I think titled one album "Emancipation" to express his discontentment with his Warner label obligations. Besides freedom, its probably more financially advantageous for the artist who otherwise must sell his soul to the label to get distribution, marketing, and airplay.
Personally, I just think the RIAA needs the competition. The music radio stations play (terrestrial or internet) amounts to advertising music product with the expectation of music sales. For any other product, the advertiser would be expected to PAY the broadcaster (or media channel)... yet somehow broadcasters must pay the RIAA to create the sales that line their pockets (even moreso than the artists themselves)...
I think this situation represents a good business opportunity for webradio and a nightmare for the RIAA and its quickly becoming obsolete business model. I hope the internet side takes up the challenge.
You are not being asked to lobby in favour of just "the RIAA's clients." The "performance royalty" is collected for all songs played, regardless of whether the artist is signed with an RIAA-affiliated label or not. An Internet broadcaster's choice is to either pay royalties at the rates prescribed by the CRB to SoundExchange for each song played times the number of listeners, or to negotiate separate deals with the copyright holder of every song they play.
The rates are so onerous that they threated to make Internet radio unprofitable, and therefore only an option to big companies and terrestrial stations (who don't pay the "performance royalty" for their over-the-air broadcasts, btw) who have other income sources to subsidize the losses they will inevitably suffer from their Internet broadcasts.
So these rates threaten to put out of business the same Internet radio stations who would be likely to play those independent artists you (and a lot of others) enjoy supporting, further entrenching the RIAA-controlled stations and giving listeners fewer choices.
Bill Goldsmith of RadioParadise has a lot of material and links on his site detailing how the rates are applied and what they mean to independent, listener-supported, commercial-free stations like his.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Ok, I wrote my Congressional reps outlining my unhappy take on this piracy and I actually received replies from Mrs. Clinton and Rep. Brian Higgins. The staff cranking out the boilerplate seems to 'get it' and it appears they are being flooded with complaints. Higgins reply contains the following:
"Public and web-based radio stations play an important role in our culture. These stations offer unique, often one-of-a-kind programming free of commercial concerns, and are an important means of public expression. Please know that I will continue to support these stations in the future."
We will see if the commercial pirates prevail but in the meantime here on the North Coast we fortunately have socialized radio from our Canadian cousins. Thank god. There are two popular genres in Canadian music, country and western but the state radio system plays a wide range of material some of it mandated by the Canadian content law. More than that they have real radio as we used to know it. Popular discussion programs hosted by savvy and civil broadcasters, cool music of all varieties (Disc Drive with Jurgen Goth comes to mind,) Satire like the Americans couldn't take, (This Hour has Twenty Minutes, Air Farce, etc). Were to you think Blitzer, Russert and Fresh Air got their early inspiration? Just take a look at the number of Canadians that have succeeded in American broadcasting. Find the CBC on the web from where you are. RIAA ain't gonna shut them down anytime soon.
Nobody listens to local am/fm after about twenty minutes around here.
You really don't understand what SoundScan is. It's not RIAA music that's covered by SoundScan. It's *ALL* music. SoundScan is being set up to handle the royalties from a *compulsory* license for music. It doesn't matter if you don't want to be covered by SoundScan. It doesn't matter if you signed up to a major label deal. Your music, if it's covered by copyright in the US, will have its royalties handled by SoundScan.
That's why I find all the complaining about the RIAA in these threads kinda silly: it'll make no difference if you listen to indie music only. It'll make no difference in the prices the stations play if they shift to entirely indie music. *Everything* is covered by SoundScan for US businesses (or companies doing business in the US).
s/SoundScan/SoundExchange/g;
sorry. typing too fast.
It seems that you and another poster discuss the issue as if only music is broadcast over the Internet (such as public affairs) and that this means anything outside the US. Perhaps that's just the American bias of /..
Digital Citizen
Maybe I don't understand this correctly.
Assume I have 2 friends that are in bands and I decide to start an internet radio station that plays songs from only those two bands. I negotiate deals with both of those bands to be able to play their music for a certain price and I pay them.
You're telling me that I still need to pay SoundExchange for something? Even though I never played any music that they control.
I find your reply odd. I don't recall myself or the other poster saying any such thing. We are commenting on an issue that specifically affects Internet stations that broadcast music. When public affairs programming is threatened with something like this, submit a story and we'll comment on it.
LOL!
Read back a couple weeks in my posting history to see what I think of people who use the term 'Americans' exclusively to refer to citizens of the United States.
For the record, I'm Canadian (go Canucks!) but - like others who have posted in this thread - greatly enjoy the freedom listening to music on commercial-free, listener-supported Internet radio represents.
Go here.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I believe you are correct. If you played their songs exclusively and you negotiated deals with them, you could opt out of making payments to SoundExchange. The trouble is, that becomes impracticable, even if you play independent bands exclusively. Especially if you are commercial-free, which I suspect you would be whether you like it or not, imagine having to play 24 hours of music seven days a week and offer enough variety to attract and keep listeners.
If you are running an Internet music station, chances are you'd like to spend your time finding, playing and listening to great music you love, rather than negotiating with representatives (ie. lawyers or - worse - people who have their heads up their ass but don't know it) from dozens or maybe hundreds of different labels in places all over the place to secure permission to play their songs in exchange for the fee you negotiate with them.
But you are correct. Technically, stations could opt out.
I don't care why you're posting AC
So SoundExchange offers a service and it's deal sucks. It sounds like they have just created an opportunity for another company to do the negotiations with indie groups.
The only thing I don't understand is why the government has anything to do with this. The only reason I could see them involved is because SoundExchange is a monopoly and using it's position unfairly. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for congress to be involved.
I've read these articles and nothing has explained this very clearly yet.
Yikes. Okay, a bit of history. In 1995, the United States (Congress? Help me out, neighbors) passed the "Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act" which basically said Internet radio stations had to pay a royalty to the owner of the copyright for the actual performance of a song, in addition to the royalties they pay to the composer.
Organizations like BMI/ASCAP (which I believe are non-profit organizations) collect royalties on behalf of composers from terrestrial and Internet stations alike. SoundExchange (a for-profit business, I believe) was appointed buy the "government" to collect the performance royalties on behalf of copyright holders. These are collected from Internet stations only.
The rates are set by the Copyright Royalty Board, who recently announced rates would be collected on a number of songs played times the number of listeners basis, at a rate per "performance" that would drive most independant, non-corporate (for lack of a better label at this late hour) Internet stations out of business.
Here's a link that explains it a lot better than I have done.
You are correct, another company could offer to collect fees on behalf of copyright holders but keep in mind, that would have to be negotiated with all copyright holders whose songs you played. If only some of the music you played was covered by these agreements, you would still have to negotiate with all of the other record companies whose music you played.
It's a lot of work for someone who just wants to spin discs and make a modest living.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Thank you for explaining.
I still see this as more of an opportunity for non-RIAA bands.
Troll? That's a little unfair
I'm in between insightful sigs right now...
Perhaps I was unclear in my response. I'll try to be more clear. I think the drive to stop this new fee schedule is problematic for a few reasons.
Show me, don't tell me: Opponents of the new fee schedule say the new fee schedule will kill outlets currently open to alternative (for lack of a better term) musical artists. When I listened to US radio (both terrestrial and over the Internet) I found these alternative artists weren't being played; the stations I heard were playing mainstream musical tracks I could hear anywhere. I had no easy way to hear these alternative artists on US radio even under the old fee schedule. So for me the battle to hear alternative musical artists has already been lost.
The claim is overbroad: Fee schedule opponents (including the place you pointed me to) set up sites and promotional drives asking me to help "Save Internet Radio" because "The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger.". My reaction to reading this is to say: no, it's not in danger. There are plenty of Internet radio broadcasters outside the US who aren't affected by this fee schedule at all. When I listen to Internet radio I listen to public affairs from outside the US, so I'm turned off (if you'll pardon the pun) by the overbroad language used by the fee schedule opponents. I think it's important to more clearly lay out the group of people who are adversely affected by the more expensive fee schedule.
Work with those who don't treat you badly instead of those who do: I think it's not too much to ask broadcasters to negotiate deals with artists who hold their own copyrights to their recorded performances, and then play those recordings instead of stuff they'd have to pay SoundExchange to play. I know you don't agree with this, you've said as much elsewhere. When you say "If you played their songs exclusively and you negotiated deals with them, you could opt out of making payments to SoundExchange." you make it is primarily a matter of political will to create and support culture we can all afford (or even share). For those motivated to play music, I wonder how much help you can get putting together a US-based musical Internet radio station that plays stuff you can share by looking for works under amenable licenses (including some of the licenses published on CreativeCommons.org) or leveraging the gathering talent of sharing-friendly labels that treat artists better than RIAA labels (like Magnatune.com).
Finally, I'm not convinced why I should care about the concerns of broadcasters who take money from their audience, advertisers, underwriters (a term of art I have unrelated problems with), and so on when those organizations don't play what I want to hear under the current fee schedule.
Digital Citizen
Thank you for your reply. I certainly understand why you feel the way you do much better now.
.0008 per performance, which is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener. The station I like played roughly 350 songs over the last 24 hours period. I have no idea how many people are listening at any given hour, but to support themselves and pay their overhead, I would assume it would be in the thousands. They state on their website the number of "active users" (which I assume to be registered users who are logged in to their web site) for this week is 5,871, and the number of "guest users" in the last 24 hours is 19,270. Can we suppose the number is 5,000 listeners per hour? I don't think it's out of line.
I tend to be really picky about word usage and sweeping generalizations, so I apologize for dismissing your point about there being more to "Internet radio" than the stations people like myself are advocating for. Yes, this issue specifically affects US stations who play music, as well as those of us (many not in the US) who enjoy listening to them.
Since we are discussing legislation that affects US-based Internet stations that play music, I am going to shorten that for the duration of the post to "affected stations."
You've asked me to show you how these fees will kill affected stations that are open to playing alternative music, as defined by you. I can not do that. I have no idea what music, and therefore what affected station, might appeal to you.
There may not be one right now. And it may be true that even the independent, listener supported station I like plays a lot of the same artists I could hear on commercial radio. But the fact is, prior to these new rates, a station like that could exist. I happen to like that business model and, who knows, maybe one day some kid will start a station in his basement that will appeal to you. That station is threatened by the proposed rates as well.
Let's do some quick math. The rates for 2006 are
In that case, these royalties would cost the station $1,400.00 US per day, or $511,000.00 per year. That is a heavy burden to place on an independently run small business that makes a lot of people all over the world happy enough to voluntarily send them money to keep them around.
I concede it is possible a station may be able to negotiate separate deals with the copyright holders of every song they play. I am not so sure it is possible for a station to draw on a large enough catalog to appeal to enough listeners to sustain themselves as either a non-profit, listener-supported or commercial entity, while negotiating one-on-one with each rights holder, unless they happen to be part of a large corporation like Clear Channel, who can afford to operate their streams at a loss in an effort to keep people who listen to them on their commutes tuned in while at work.
Where is the revenue going to come from to pay these fees you are negotiating separately?
You will need either donations from listeners or advertising revenue. Both require a large listenership, which means a large enough catalog of music to appeal to enough people to pay for itself. Oh, and you need to pay all of your operating costs too.
If you know of an example of a station that is doing this - and I mean the part about negotiating individual deals with the copyright holder of every song they play - I'd like to hear about it.
To me there is no choice there, and affected stations who can not afford to pay the CRB rates will be gone, leaving the AOLs, the Clear Channels, the MSNs etc, as far as what is available out of the US.
But I don't live in the US, so why do I care?
Well, I don't know where you live or whether your country has ratified the WIPO treaty. Mine hasn't, but the US is hammering away at our politicians to bring our laws in line with theirs.
So maybe my answer to you is you should care about the stations you don't listen to being threatened, because one day someone might threaten the ones you do listen to.
I don't care why you're posting AC
The fees for licensing might not exist, depending on what one plays. As I understand it, there is a lot of music to be played under licenses that allow sharing and cost no money. I hate to keep bringing up the same example repeatedly, but Magnatune.com lets you download anything from their catalog under a Creative Commons license that allows non-commercial rebroadcast in any medium (in a brief peek I saw some classical music licensed under the BY-NC-SA v1.0, US English version). I don't work for Magnatune nor do I benefit from mentioning them at all; they are doing what I think others could do as well and I believe their catalog will greatly benefit anyone looking to put together an Internet radio station of their own. Getting tracks from them is negotiating a deal with someone sufficiently empowered to license it to you.
To distribute the data, perhaps there's some sort of cooperative model which would let the listeners take on some of the load of rebroadcasting. Ideally, one would visit a website and without any setup or programming skill they could simultaneously listen to the station and share it with others. Would this would cut down on the transmission costs to the point where a consumer-grade "broadband" Internet connection work? This line might be inexpensive enough that many people already have they Internet connection they need to do the job. Some hosters could help drive down the cost of the station further still—Dreamhost.com has very inexpensive hosting packages with high bandwidth quotas and lots of storage. Depending on how one defines an Internet radio station, a playlist with a bunch of track files could qualify. Maybe you could run a program that concatenates tracks together creating a seamless audio stream.
One of the terms I've been throwing around in a fast and loose way is "Internet radio station". Jamendo.org, kahvi.org, and Magnatune.com are labels which each stream all of their catalog on-demand and gratis (with varying levels of quality and in various formats—Jamendo and kahvi can use high quality Ogg Vorbis files and Magnatune lets one download 128kbps MP3s with an automated announcer on the end of each track). Are they radio stations? Magnatune calls their playlists radio stations and I can't see why they aren't.
Digital Citizen
I appreciate the heads up on these music resources. I will definately check them out. (One of the benefits of taking part in discussions at Slashdot is I actually learn something from time-to-time from the people I converse with).
Forgive me for resorting to analogies, but it's like someone is threatening to take apples away from us, and you're saying "I don't like apples anyway. And besides, you can have an oragne, or a banana" and you've given me plenty of compelling reasons to try bananas, but I'd like to keep apples around as well.
I am all for Creative Commons/GPL/Copyleft/whatever-the-creator-desires style licenses. I use and support FOSS software, financially and by using and extolling the virtues of FOSS to other users. I use it at work, and the company paid to support it. It represents freedom and choice, two things I value highly.
To me, what Bill and Rebecca - the proprieters of my faverite station - have done is similar. After years of working for big corporate interests (which is where the radio jobs are in the US) they took a chance on a new medium and started their own station. And they said to their visitors/listeners you can use what we have to offer for free, not crippled or encumbered, just listen to our high-quaility streams and if you think this is a thing of value, that you want to keep around, support us. They've been around for years. Listeners upload/rate/comment on songs, participate in forums, and vote on potential additions to the playlist. They pay royalties to BMI/ASCAP for artists and they've paid the Performance Royalty for years, so they're "good citizens." And because they pay these royalties, artists benefit from their efforts as well. Listeners purchase more music, usually from an artist they hadn't heard before. Many of these artists are independent, and they benefit from the exposure a successful station not beholden to the RIAA can give them.
To me what they have done is very similar to a successful FOSS project. So there's freedom. I hope others are inspired to go this route, rather than the throw commercials, pop-ups, banner ads or what ever at their visitors route. That's choice.
You have exposed me to sources of of music I haven't explored yet, and for that I thank you. I hope we will all have freedom and choice in the future.
I don't care why you're posting AC