Internet Radio Will Go Silent on June 26th

Spamicles writes "Thousands of U.S. webcasters plan to turn off the music and go silent this Tuesday, June 26th, to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of this country's Internet radio industry. In March, the Copyright Royalty Board announced that it would raise royalties for Internet broadcasters, moving them from a per-song rate to a per-listener rate. The increase would be made retroactive to the beginning of 2006 and would double over the next five years. Internet radio sites would be charged per performance of a song. A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 "performances" for each song it plays."

Comments

Solidarity!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not even in the music industry, but I'll be shutting down my web site (w/a notice explaining why & a link if someone has one) on that day to bring awareness to this issue.

Re:What does this mean for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or would that be disallowed completely, even if the person wasn't broadcasting any music that they might have say over?

Exactly. Soundexchange gets paid even for non-member music. The law says that if you can't pay them, you don't play the music.

Now, there is one thing though, Soundexchange is required to allow artists and radio stations to contract directly and individually and is required to track all of these individual contracts so that they don't bill for those recordings. As creative commons grows, we might have a bit of a weapon to fight back with, if on our end we set up something more-or-less automatic for creating those contracts, it may turn out that we can swamp Soundexchange with them if they haven't already automated their end of the deal. If we can, and Soundexchange fails to keep up their end of the law, since they are "deputized" to operate the law, their failure might be prosecutable as malfeasance (if you can convince the Department of Justice to care about corporations), especially if it can be shown that at some step of the way they intentionally refused a contract or knowingly billed for a contracted performance.

Retroactive?

[ricree]

So, you know those prices we told you to pay last year? We were totally kidding about that, it definitely should have been higher then. So go ahead and fork over the rest of the money you owe us.


Seriously, though, how in the heck can a price increase be retroactive?

Re:except for Last.fm

[GiMP]

Last.fm is, at least historically, a UK company. Since their servers (and the music) is broadcast from the UK, I'm not sure this will affect them. The problem now, of course, is that they're now owned by CBS. Still, with Lastfm being a UK branch/division, they should be safe.

But of course, IANAL.

Interesting about who has said things about this

[ducomputergeek]

Now I'm going to say two words that will automatically get me modded down around here, but Rush Limbauqh had a segment about this on his show a few weeks ago when he was explaining why internet feeds contained minutes of silence during song parodies, etc. and about this new policy and how it was going to kill internet radio and wasn't fair. He explained that for his show, it could easily translate into $36,000 a day worth of royalities that would be hard for even a show with a large audience (and high ad rates) to cover.

I do listen to a lot of Online Radio, primarily KTRS 550, and KMOX out of my home town of St. louis at work. There are some afternoon shows I like to listen too and now since I live out both of their radio range (I can get KMOX sometimes at night, but now that the Cards games have moved...)

Still I listen to more podcasts of shows that aren't in my market like the Tony Kornheiser show and then some of the ESPN shows like PTI.

I had my own radio show on the college radio back in the day, and I remember we were charged by the song, not the number of listeners, but as a low power system, I'm not sure how all those rates are calculated anymore. If that is still the case, this just seems like a way to cut competition for terrestrial radio stations.

Re:Supply and demand

[ClickOnThis]

Internet radio differs from broadcast radio in the same way that recording tapes from a CD differs from uploading to a P2P network: you can reach thousands more people, and you can get perfect copies of the broadcasts by stream ripping. Hence they use this excuse as a far greater potential revenue loss as compared to regular radio, which offers many less options in terms of distribution. Fair enough. But internet radio stations are simply asking to pay the same rates as satellite radio, which also offers a digital feed that can be captured by some consumer devices. (Granted, many of these devices are encumbered with DRM-ish "features.")