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

Re:Supply and demand

[karmatic]

This is the crux of why everyone is so upset - it's impossible to grow to any significant size and be ad-supported under the new rates.

An example:

KROQ, "the nation's top rock station", would owe $1.4 _billion_ in royalties in 2010, if they paid the new internet rates. Their annual revenue is around $67 million. They are a highly successful radio station, and don't have to pay the per-user bandwidth fees that internet stations do (economies of scale). See the problem?