Slashdot Mirror
The SoundExchange Billion Dollar Administrative Fee
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."
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...
Cheer up, the rest of the world will still have freedom on the internet. It's just us Americans who will be regulated out of having any expression.
We'll still be able to listen to Russian stations.
Where's you're "In Soviet Russia..." joke now, bitches?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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.
If Pandora has ten thousand listeners like me, that's twenty thousand stations times $500 per station is ten million dollars. That's probably enough to kill Pandora and any other customizable channel internet radio site. But if the internet radio site only had say five channels, that's only $2,500, easily affordable by a commercial site.
My conclusion from this little exercise is that the RIAA is out to kill customizable channels. They don't want you to learn about music on your own. They only want you to listen to whatever the latest pop sensation is. They want to eliminate choice and the extra expense of having so many artists. If they can make it so all you ever hear is the generic artist of the moment, that's all you'll know and all you'll buy.
This is all about control. RIAA wants to make sure they control not just your access to their artists but your ability to discover new artists not under their contracts. Internet radio is a growing force and a growing threat to their ability to pick what music you buy.
I can only hope that they have overreached; that the huge amount of money involved here makes their motives visible to Congress. And that Congress cares. That sure makes it sound like a lost cause, doesn't it?