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The SoundExchange Billion Dollar Administrative Fee

Posted by Zonk on from the crushing-greed dept.

palewook writes "On June 7th, Yahoo, RealNetworks, Pandora, and Live365 sent letters to US lawmakers emphasizing they owe SoundExchange 'administrative fees' of more than $1 billion dollars a year. These fees would be paid for the 'privilege' of collecting the increased CRB royalties effective July 15th, unless the Internet Radio Equality Act passes Congress. SoundExchange, the non-profit music industry entity, admits the levied charge of $500 per 'channel' is supposed to only cover their administrative costs. Last year, SoundExchange collected a total of $20 million dollars from the Internet radio industry. Under the new 'administrative fee' RealNetworks, which hosted 400,000 unique subscribed channels in 2006, would owe an annual administrative charge of 200 million dollars in addition to the retroactive 2006 rate hike per song played."

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder what real will do.... by d3ity · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder what Real Networks will do if they can't come up with the $200 million dollars they apparently owe... They'll probably stall for time... Buffering...

  2. Re:Only Americans will be silenced by cabinetsoft · · Score: 5, Funny

    In Soviet Russian, the radio listens to YOU!
    That ain't funny, that's informative! The radio, the ashtray, the walls...
  3. Re:dollars $ dollars by 2.7182 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I was walking over to an ATM machine the other day, when I realized that many other people have the same PIN number as me. I thought "they should have a personalized PIN number." Also, my bank still uses those old CRT tubes and they are hard to read, so they really need to upgrade the whole thing. Anyway I went into the bank to sit and talk to a representative about this, and I was reading a DC comic, and the light next to me was flickering. Damn that AC current! I took out my laptop, since I wanted to learn more about CSS style sheets. (Are they under the GPL license btw ?) After about 5 minutes of reading I had a headache - I felt like an ICBM missile had hit my head! Or maybe it was from my LCD display. What I need is a vacation I thought - so I went home and started to pack my SCUBA gear.