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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."
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
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!
Coln. Mustard in the kitchen with the revolver.
In other news, Congress continues to sluggishly review sluggishly review H.R.2060: Internet Radio Equality Act. If you write a senator (or actually, house member) perhaps one should mention support for this.
While your writing, put in a bad word about this one. Colleges don't need to be wasting time and money trying to stop software piracy on campuse. Oh, and maybe this one, too.
Demented But Determined.
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.
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
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
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
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).