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Day of Silence On the Internet
A number of readers sent in stories about Net radio going dark for a day. Not all of it, but according to the Globe and Mail at least 45 stations representing thousands of channels. The stations are protesting a ruling establishing royalty rates that will put most of them out of business on July 15. "The ruling... is expected to cost large webcasters such as Yahoo and Real Networks millions of dollars, drive smaller websites like Pandora.com and Live365.com out of business and leave a large chunk of the 72 million Net radio listeners in the dark." SaveNetRadio has a page where US residents can locate their senators and representatives to call them today.
...am having a day of silence on the net.
It's not going so well so far... argg... must... stop... posting...
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Ok here we go:
.007 cents per song streamed, the new rates go up to .019 centes by 2010. These rate changes are also retroactive to something like the beginning of this year. Also, there is apparently a $500 per channel minimum, in case your station is too small to generate enough revenue.
The Copyright Royalties Board recently (March 2, 2007) enacted new regulations which increase the "royalties" owed by internet broadcasters; instead of paying
From what I understand, the "per song streamed" is calculated not by just how many songs you broadcast, but also how many listeners you had for each particular song. So if 10 people listened to a 30 Seconds From Mars track, it would count as 10 songs, not 1.
Who gets the money? SoundExchange. Under such protest, the generously offered webcasters the gracious offer of being able to pay the reduced rates for a little longer than originally scheduled. How nice of them!
Basically it boils down to the fact that terrestrial broadcasters pay no royalties whatsoever to the recording companies, but the recording industry wants to extort as much money as they can from the internet music business. Which, in turn, will most likely drive most internet radio out of the game.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
- A fee is levied to a broadcaster, per song per listener. The fee also increases every year (as far as I understand, there was a fee previously, but it is being increased).
- The fee is retroactive to January 2006, due immediately when the rate increases go into effect.
- There is a minimum fee of $500 per year.
Because of these changes (which are not applicable to terrestrial or satellite radio broadcasters), many webcasters will be forced to shut down on July 15 because they will not have the revenue to pay the new fees (ie. they will go bankrupt).Instead, the Internet Radio Equality Act proposes a lower royalty fee (0.33 cents per hour per listener) or a revenue sharing agreement.
Won't work. The issue is that SoundExchange, which is the 'collections agency', has gotten the right to collect money "on behalf of" ALL artists, even those not registered with it. So even playing small-name garage-bands has the exact same price. The payments being foisted on the net radio companies have nothing to do with the actual artists at all.
Okay, here's what I understand of it.
In the beginning. Prior to 1995, you could 'perform' music in public, via digital broadcasting, without paying any royalties on it. I'm a little fuzzy on exactly what you used to have to pay royalties for (Wikipedia says there was "no performance right" for artists, but that doesn't make a lot of sense, I remember performance-rights cases prior to '95; I think it was just a digital thing), but anyway, in 1995 Congress passed a law granting rightsholders control over the digital 'performance' of their works. The upshot of this was that anyone distributing music digitally now had to pay 'performance' royalties for it.
Obviously, trying to pay royalties directly to the owner of each piece of music that you might play on a radio station would be problematic. It would require negotiating a license with each rightsholder, for each work, for every station. The paperwork and negotiations would be crippling. So a provision was made for so-called 'statutory licenses,' basically blanket licenses that you buy from an organization who takes the proceeds and divides them up among artists. (Blanket broadcast licenses like this aren't a new thing, but this extended them to digital broadcasting.) In return, you can play whatever you want, without worrying about negotiating individual contracts. The cost and rate structure of these licenses is set, theoretically, by the U.S. Copyright Office.
Enter SoundExchange. The RIAA [1] has a division/subsidiary/department-of-evil called "SoundExchange", which is designated, by the U.S. Copyright Office, as the sole supplier of "statutory licenses" for digital music. So if you wanted to run an internet radio station or other digital broadcast, and weren't going to stick to just playing independent artists who have relinquished some of their rights to public performance, you needed to go to SoundExchange and buy a license. While philosophically objectionable to many (including many artists!) because of the metrics they use to distribute the fees, SoundExchange had licensing terms that weren't horrific, including some that were based on a percentage-of-revenue (I've heard 10-13% quoted). So if you were running a small-time internet radio station, the fees wouldn't break the bank. This has been the status quo for a while now.
The Rubber Stamp. The current controversy started a while back, when SoundExchange proposed, and the Copyright Office approved, a dramatic rate hike. Among other things, the new rates eliminated the percent-of-revenue model, replacing it instead with a per-song-per-listener model, combined with a minimum per-channel fee, and a bunch of other onerous terms (including making the fees retroactive to some point in the past, which would instantly force any station without large cash reserves out of existence). The bottom line was that under the new fees, most small internet radio stations -- particularly those who have lots of channels tailored to particular musical tastes or genres -- just wouldn't be able to pay the bills. The effect as far as I can tell, would be to make Internet radio much like terrestrial broadcast radio: dominated by a few corporate-backed players (e.g., Last.fm), with a small number of channels playing basically the same thing. The new rates, if nothing happens to forestall them, go into effect around the middle of next month.
[1] Okay, allegedly it's "independent" now. Riiight...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In solidarity, I won't download any illegal music torrents for 24 hours. I'll keep my uploads going, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, I called my people in Congress. Levin hasn't taken a position and wouldn't say when he would (I'll take that as "no"). Stabenow put me on voicemail and promised to call back (funny, "no" again). Dingell, ah there's the funny part. I talk to the aide, he hasn't heard about the bill. I tell him H.R.2060 and he's able to look it up. Then says they are not familiar with the bill. I ask when it'll be voted on and the aide says the bill is still in committee. I ask, "how can I find out who is on the committee?" His reply, "Dingell is chair of the committee." Sounds like the bill is doomed.