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Internet Radio's "Last Stand"
We've been discussing the plight of Internet radio for some time, as the Copyright Royalty Board imposed royalties that industry observers predicted would prove lethal to the nascent industry. We discussed Web radio's day of silence in protest, which won the industry a reprieve, and the futile efforts to find relief in Congress. Now it's looking as if the last act is indeed close. Death Metal Maniac sends along this Washington Post story with extensive quotes from Pandora CEO Tim Westergren, who said: "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money... We're funded by venture capital. They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken." The article estimates that XM Satellite Radio will pay "about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener." That's 70% of projected revenue for Pandora; smaller players estimate the hit at 100% to 300% of revenue.
(I have to pay $0.08 for every person reading this post because of the subject.)
So I estimate that XM satellite radio will pay 0 cents per hour per listener in 2010.
satellite killed the internet star?
rewriting history since 2109
Thats really unfortunate. Corporations and the government can be thanked for limiting competition due to greed and in effect slowing down the potential rate of our innovation. I can only imagine what our country would be like if we had invested into our country just a portion of the money spent on war. Massive revamp on transportation with maglev trains across the country, and increased standards of living without the devaluation of the dollar. Pandora is innovation, and even its results (wide array of music tailored to each individual) can inspire creativity in individuals and further propel innovation. Those looking to maximize profits beyond what is necessary seem to have their sights set too narrow and either do not see or care that people across the internet can develop something better as a community.
They also need an educational rate for colleges and schools and a non-commercial hobbiest rate for small 'bedroom' Internet stations
The more I follow the story of the fate of internet radio, the more I boggle over the collective stupidity of the Copyright Royalty Board.
By raising the rates, they're practically ensuring that they're not only pissing a lot of people off (almost everyone I know uses Pandora, for instance), but they're taking their revenue stream and choking it to death. Tons of net radio broadcasters are going to be forced to shut down over this, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it means that, despite the increased royalty rates, they actually make far less in fees in the long run. And that goes doubly so for Pandora, which is one of the best ways I've seen for music fans to find new artists and new styles of music they may never have considered before. So much for that revenue-boosting avenue.
I just don't understand why shareholders of the major record companies don't revolt. These jokers in charge seem dead set on destroying the "industry". Boneheaded moves like trying to keep new music away from listeners is just asinine. Radio is how many people find new (or old) songs for the first time. Clearly net radio is a huge market, why shoot themselves in the foot in the name of short term greed.
What if I'm the owner of an internet radio station that plays only music that has become public domain through the consent of the owner or the expiration of copyrights?
Or perhaps I only like to play songs by artists who sell their CD's for less than the industry standard. Say, $5 a CD. Will my fees be lessened?
The artists really need to get involved. Laws like this are taking away more revenue than they are generating. For example, last.fm will recommend a group based on what I've been listening to. More often than not, I will listen to more of that group's music. If I like it, I find out if they are coming to a venue nearby. I go to the show and buy merchandise, because I know that's the best way to get money into the right hands.
It's kind of what I imagine FM radio used to be, but we all know what happened to that.
It's such a joke. we aren't going to have free radio anywhere anymore. Hardly anyone listens to XM or Sirus (hence the merger) and the radio already has so many ads that it takes more effort than its worth to constantly flip stations.
I was going to start using Pandora off my iPhone at work and on the way to work along with my normal playlists, but I'm afraid that web radio stations aren't going to make it after this price point.
I'm sure Pandora will stick it out since 30% of it's profit, will still be profit, but most places with limited ads on their sites will either have to increase their ads or ad revenue to stay afloat and knowing how little companies like to pay for advertising space this wont work out well for them.
I'm sorry everyone who listens to music for free, but doesn't download illegally, it looks like the music industry knows no bounds in how to FUCK PEOPLE OVER.
*sad face*
*middle finger* (D.C. beltway style)
No. Internet radio will not die. It will just move outside the more and more draconian USA.
Remember that Internet radio's rates are almost TWICE as high as satellite's. The only thing I can come up with is that SoundExchange WANTS to put Internet radio out of business for some reason-that's the reason they're setting rates as high as they are!
before you die? I started listening to Internet radio seven months ago. Since then, I haven't listened to my MP3 collection at all, or been on any file sharing networks to expand it.
...and now they want me to go back to my MP3 collection? Surely, they're not dumb enough to believe that I'll go back to Clear Channel? Right?
I've been exposed to and promoted countless new bands that I never would have heard of on my own.
They'll claim that there will still be "radio" on the internet offered from regular radio stations. However, that is only a gimmick and advertising to promote another separate business (the original radio station), and means that an entire industry is being destroyed.
This move makes no sense other than to "test the waters" to see how far they can push business before they go bust.
*US based* internet radio's last stand...
Don't forget... In the free world US laws do not apply...
--frank[at]unternet.org
You know, it seems that we need to try to take lessons maybe from the Pirate Radio stations of the past and present that operate on the fringe, or in areas untouchable by the powers that be.
Too bad we can't do some kind of distributable P2P type application, that would allow anyone to run streaming music/video into the ether....but, is untraceable as to origin. Some type of freenet type thing for streaming content. That way, anyone could set up a Pirate Internet Radio Station (PIRS ?).
Is anything like this possible I wonder?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ah, that's the Dark Side of greed.
The Light Side of greed sparks innovation because folks have an incentive to make money by creating something new.
The Dark Side always goes after the weak: the ones that can't innovate. It promises easy money, high barriers to entry with laws and regulations, keeping the status quo. Some greed masters like Masters Jobs and Wozniak break into a field of greed. They, being great greed masters, broke IBM along with another, though maligned greed master, Gates. But even then, The Dark Side can even ake the best of us as it did Master Gates. He seams to be coming back to the Light Side with his charity work.
Pay heed young greed patiwan, the Dark Side is always there for the lazy!
How this affects things like Internet website talk radio with no music and no commercials?
I am in the process of setting up a talk radio icecast server on a website and this is sort of worrying.
Anybody got a URL or two they want to share?
They obviously haven't worked out the model yet - traditional broadcasters don't pay nearly as much - in Australia the equivalent body takes less than 4%.
There is a point when trying to fight the society with it's own rules is futile.
Think about what this sick society orders you: You have to believe in stupid jesus, you can't smoke pot, you can't have privacy, you can't listen to music, Save on your energy use so the big industries can have more oil for them, You can't say shit on tv, blah blah blah!!!
B U L L S H I T.
Screw them, most of what we do daily to maintain some level of freedom in our lives is illegal. If you really abide by all the rules, pay all the taxes, and stick to stupid society's moral rules, YOU ARE NOT ALIVE, you become a Zombie.
I'll sniff, drink, believe, take, download, copy, share, do, read, write, think, say, modify, film and build WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
all you gotta do his fork over teh dough to XM/Sirius and you can have all the cookie cutter muzic you want...and now with commercial chips added, too!
I sure do love cookies. Mmmmm.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
All traditional broadcasters pay is ASCAP, BMI and SESAC fees-NOTHING to SoundExchange-though there's a bill in Congress now that aims to change that too! The record companies want to force radio stations to pay as well.
Listening to SomaFM Lush as I sit at my computer. Sure, they ask for money once or twice an hour and there's definitly some repeating (but I love 95% of the songs, so who cares), but I can't imagine what it'll be like with no internet radio. Sad, just sad.
it is certain that recording a sound you hear is uncontrollable. you can shut down internet radios but even when you shut down music distribution over the internet (God forbid), you wouldn't be controlling pirates. if any company wants to restrict copying any material, it should not record anything in the first place. we have microphones anyhow...
copying a CD is illegal, sure (lossless).
ripping a CD into mp3 format is illegal, hmm.. doubtful.. but okay. (lossy, may perceptually be lossless)
really low quality mp3 is illegal, why?? (simply lossy, we can't even hear most of the instruments in it)
this forces me to raise a question:
would murmuring a song and distributing a recorded version of it be illegal?
or.. would converting a song into acapella (except copyrighted "acapella" songs) and distributing it be illegal?
is it purely illegal when we whistle in tune?
where's the limit of copyright?
Satellite radio already was struggling. Remember, cash flow was a big part of the reason for the merger between XM and Sirius. They were competing with free broadcast stations, and it was slow going to convince people to sign up. I think they were finally getting help from auto manufacturers including satellite radio equipment in new cars. However, if they now have to raise their rates to pay for copyright royalties, I think they are going to start to lose market share.
...then please consider paying the $3 a month to subscribe. Seriously.
I know the sentiment is that we don't want to pay for music unless it's in the form of a DRM-free, lossless file which we can give to all of our friends. We want it for $0.10 per track, and when the industry makes it available for $0.10 a track, we'll just say that we want it for $0.05 a track and go about our swashbuckling ways.
I fully understand that Pandora does not meet this requirement. It's just not their model. I just ask that you think of it it this way: does Pandora give you $3 worth of musical enjoyment a month?
Mainstream radio sucks. Supporting Pandora gives each of us a chance to be part of the solution, not the problem.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Internet radio will live forever
It just won't contain the overdubbed pop tarts and overworked back catalog of the RIAA. I'm ok with that. The sooner we hear the last of them, the better.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ummm... OCR is all great and all but it plays... Well, video game music. Which is great and all, but most of us would need a site like this http://thepiratebay.org/ to get the music we want
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This is just yet another example of how the current copyright regime is prima facia unconstitutional.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
Copyright is not a property right; copyright is an agreement between the public and authors & inventors creating a privilege of limited exclusive right as incentive for dissemination of ideas because otherwise authors & inventors have only the choice of keeping their inventions secret or sharing them that the recipient does what he or she will with the information without limitation, which is the natural right of the recipient.
Any mechanism of securing exclusive right to the author or inventor must meet two tests to be constitutional:
An attempt was made to test the absurdly long exclusive term against the "limited" requirement and that failed because any finite term is by definition limited.
The test that must now be made is against the requirement that copyright laws "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." The burden of proof should be on demonstrating that the laws do promote the progress of science and the useful arts because copyright is a limitation on the rights of the public and therefore intrinsically a burden on society. In granting copyright society temporarily yields their natural right to a privilege offered authors & inventors, a privilege that may be revoked at any time.
Current copyright laws do not pass the test of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts; they are a burden on innovation and have systematically retarded the progress of science and technology, strangling many significant innovations, once again with internet radio. Current copyright laws are therefore unconstitutional.
Yes, that is exactly right. And that means we should be more determined than ever to support pop culture which is sustainable, i.e. NO RIAA music. Sadly, most people really are passive "consumers" of entertainment, but it certainly doesn't have to be that way.
Personally, I've been creating, buying, and listening to RIAA-free music exclusively for over two years now. When that music goes offline it will pretty much a non-event for me as a listener.
Caveat Utilitor
While doing research for another project, I stumbled onto a few interesting notes about other innovators whose nuts were cut off by government regulation, competition from the establishment, etc.
One was the USPS. The US Postal Service designed two electronic mail document delivery services, E-COM and Intelpost. E-COM was rolled out in 1977. Immediately, Congress, the FCC and private companies started screaming about anti-trust, et. al, and eventually the programs were neutered and then completely abandoned. The history of E-COM is really fascinating, especially since I've never viewed the USPS as a source for cutting-edge innovation. But they tried.
The other was an early distrust of cable TV delivery systems, going back to the early 1950's and not ending until the 1970's. My local city council and politicians rallied hard against the evil empire of paid TV and even convinced voters to approve measures that ensured that the whole concept of TV that you paid for was shelved for decades. Other later innovators had to sue the pants off everyone in order to be allowed to move forward with the technology that today we all take for granted.
Sadly it sounds as if Pandora and internet radio is going to be stomped and the fire put out by clueless windbags and corporate interests who don't understand that this is the future, whether they like it or not.
sign your own bands...
I don't listen to net music radio at all, just talk radio which isn't threatened by this music deal, but are you saying these internet music broadcasters don't have an easy way to mash a button mid song while you are listening to it and have you automagically purchase it cheap? Or at least get it lined up in some purchasing queue, so the bands and promoters could see this was an effective medium. How the heck are they to know you heard it on pandora then went over to itunes to purchase it? I would have thought that would be common and easy by now.
Things should be "fair" across the board for Internet, Satellite and Terrestrial royalty rates.
If H.R.4789/S.2500 [ Performance Rights Act ] sees the light of day we might see that equality, although it may annihilate the "Mom & Pop" stations.
Right now, Terrestrial stations are floating in money! Why? Take a guess at how much they pay for broadcasting the same music. A company named "Clear Channel" will get pretty bent if they have to pay the rate Internet, or even Satellite broadcasters have to pay.
Equality First!
I'm curious, how does college radio factor into all this? The station in my city plays all kinds of music, jazz, indie, metal, mainstream, you name it. AFAIK they don't pay the music industry a dime to do this, but they don't make any money either. Once a year they hold a funding drive that basically pays for the transmitter and equipment. Does this fall under fair use? Or am I wrong in thinking they don't pay royalties for what they play?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I'd hate to be the guy that had to swap out the backup tapes.
So wait... OCR which basically takes video game music and redistributes them isn't as bad as TPB which basically takes MP3s and redistributes them? Granted, OCR does have a lot of remixes, but the "chiptunes" are equivalent to video game MP3s.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'd like the RIAA to become extinct but I have a serious question. Is there anything the RIAA does that is good? I'm not looking for any negative replies - I know all the negatives. I'm just wondering if someone can tell some of the positive things that they do. There has to be at least one thing positive.
In pure capitalism, the MAFIAA would have long been driven out of business.
Much like communism, the laissez-faire brand of capitalism that I assume 'pure' stands for can't work. In fact, unregulated capitalism would literally be corporately-run communism.
:)
Without regulation, the biggest company wins absolutely everything. The biggest company has the the best deals, the best resources, the best connections, the broadest selection of goods and services and absolutely no other business can compete short of doing something that Mega Corporation Inc. hasn't thought of yet... and no doubt it will get its hands into THAT market too, hiring the best people and using its infinite resources to cut out the little guy.
A lot of this goes on ALREADY in the U.S, but thanks to rules, regulations and *some* government interest of keeping the market fair, the little guys can still exist, even if it is just barely in some markets... (Although there is certainly a few where they can't at all.)
Well, my point is, the RIAA would only go under in a 100% capitalistic society if they were superseded by something greater than themselves or if they just weren't needed. This is a little bit of a thought experiment, but I *might* argue with myself that the RIAA wouldn't be needed to start with, because a 'pure' capitalistic society would be fairly unregulated and such things as copyrights etc... wouldn't exist - not in a government-issued sense. This would have rendered the RIAA obsolete. BUT, I imagine you'd probably find a privatized version of the copyright system economically enforced by Mega Corporation Inc, which no doubt, would effectively be the RIAA too.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Because nothing changes until a catastrophe. Or, if it doesn't then the world is just a little more horrid for everyone. It's like when I drive and there's a cop behind me. I go about 17mph and hopefully, someday, someone will get so fed up they'll go home and stab somebody or crash their car or whatnot. No internet radio? Super, just another reason to watch the record companies eventually go broke and all the executives children have to suck dick for rent.
Or at least they pay the most $$$ to the corrupt politicians who are once again giving our @sses away so they can cling to a position in Washington.
Support college radio, it'll be the last bastion of any real venue variety in very short order.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
They still have to pay if it is 100% indie and creative commons released music and unsigned. Soundxchange, the MAFIIA front organization, collects royalties on ALL music by law streamed on the net to inside the US, from inside or outside. There is no "opt out" for musicians. This is partially why it sucks so bad. You could open a stream direct from your desktop on your dsl connection and play a kazoo, and they are authorized to collect royalties for that. You owe them for your own music being streamed off your own server, "legally".
All of music I've purchased in the last two years has been stuff I was introduced to on Pandora. I would have never discovered most of the music and I now listen to if it wasn't for that service. By killing Pandora, the music industry is cutting off more of their revenue.
If Pandora goes under from this I'm not buying another album or song again...
http://p2p-radio.sourceforge.net/
Keep in mind the music industry originally wanted $5/song which would have meant that it'd never take off thus iTunes and internet selling of music tracks would never have happened.
They don't WANT it to happen unless it will make them generate a ridiculous amount of money. Not reasonable. Ridiculous.
All the FM stations got bought out by Clearchannel and other conglomerates, and they all play the same songs broadcast from a central location. No more local DJs, no more local news, no more local weather, no more local music.
FM radio puts an emphasis on back catalog - rarely is there any new music that appeals to me. I do not care for hip hop, rap, etc. There is no variety in music, and there is a lot of music out there (esp independent labels) that is not getting played on FM radio.
Payola has pushed the independents out of FM radio. Nobody wants to admit that there is a white elephant in the room. Because the radio conglomerates have gotten greedy, the music variety suffers.
The obesity of advertising - way too much of it - has driven listeners away from FM radio. They are tired of the high ad-to-program ratio of program time. Radio conglomerates got too greedy when they consolidated all the FM stations and then tried to raise revenue through advertising.
The end result is a mass exodus of listeners away from FM radio. Many of my friends no longer listen to radio and they listen to songs on their ipods, their mp3 car radios, their internet radios, etc.
Independent labels found an outlet through internet radio and former FM radio listeners are embracing it enthusiastically. The FM radio lobby is extremely powerful and they conspired to use the royalty fees to drive the internet radio out of the market. That is not how capitalism is supposed to work.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
No, just music, you are cool to go on talk radio all you want. I was going to do that myself but I can't get anything but dialup where I am at right now. Man does that suck. All the other things make this is a good place to be for me now, so I am not going to move just to get broadband. I am hoping it might be WiMax to the rescue *someday*. With my flying car.
This is only true if they also play *IAA pap. If the Internet Radio station doesn't play that stuff they don't have to pay royalties.
From Wikipedia : SoundExchange collects royalties for artists and copyright owners whose work is used under the statutory license.
After reviewing Copyright Royalty and Distribution Reform Act of 2004 I find this:
So apparently as long as you only stream creative commons licensed audio separately licensed for streaming with terms for recordkeeping and terms notice you should be ok to stream audio because you are not relying on the "statutory license" but rather "License agreements voluntarily negotiated".
The problem for the Internet Radio stations is they don't want to air the commons. Waah. They want to pump the same garbage that's coming out of my radio and I've heard all of it I care to. There's been nothing new there for a decade it seems like, and when they do get an interesting piece they play it until I'm sick of it in one day. And they should have to pay to air the garbage that gets airtime on over-the-air radio so as to discourage the practice. It's awful. Not one thin dime to the *IAA and their artists. If the artist wants to get his work played in that forum - even if it's CC licensed - he's part of the persistence of that problem and I'm not interested in his work either. You can't roll in the sewer without getting stinky.
So where are you getting your information from?
I am not a lawyer. If you need one hire one.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So basically, I'm forced to indirectly defend the RIAA assholes, who abuse people and artists, because YOU also abuse society.
I think you have that backwards. Society is the abusive figure in life.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
It seems to me that all they are doing is hurting the big labels with this charge.
I mean, the internet radio stations can still broadcast original music from unsigned bands and not pay a penny of this extortionate music tax because if unsigned, the bands themselves exclusively own and control the rights to their own music.
So only the big labels lose out, meaning everyone else wins. No doubt the bands would give free rights to the internet radio stations as they would be only too grateful for the airplay, the internet stations get tax-free content to air, and even the audience win as we finally get some original music instead of the usual formulaic commercial crap the labels are currently forcing on us.
I say we all help out. What, 30 or 40 dollars a month from all of us and we should be able to save this.
No, I don't mean giving it to pandora, that wouldn't do anything. I mean we can buy a senator! Imagine if we had a say in government, we could do so much! Lets buy one as a team. Any good ones for sale?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
I'd gladly pay $0.03 an hour for Pandora. That's less than $8/month, cheaper than crappy SIRIUS. The only difference is I'd probably not leave the radio on for the cat when I go to work.
To really expand they need to put Pandora in the car. Would a 2.5G or 3G cell-tether cut it?
When the man oppresses, you have to take matters into your own hands.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Last I checked there were countries outside of the borders of the US, and many of those countries have their own internet radio, hosted on servers in their country. I know a lot of users are from the US, but come on. This is the internet. All it means is you can listen to some music from somewhere else...
What if the site has a custom player that:
1) Downloads the song
2) plays it locally
3) begins downloading the next song
4) repeat
Music downloads at streaming bitrates should be much shorter than the average song. If you absolutely needed DRM, that's still not a problem.
Since there is no streaming going on, just multiple downloads, can indie music be sent without the unfair Sound Exchange tax?
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Any time I get a hankering for a song at work I just search for it on YouTube. It usually has some smarmy homebrew video to go with the music, but I minimize the window and just listen to the song.
YouTube is like a jukebox.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I listen to a lot of internet radio.
Can this possibly have any impact on stations originating from outside the united states? It appears that my musical taste is about to head offshore quickly, and with it goes my purchasing power.
bend like the reed
This is just another shining example of why DRM is ruining the world for Artists and Consumers alike. Yay DMCA!!!
Not all of satellite stations are commercial-free... they are still supported by the sale of equipment and advertising, in addition to any subscription revenue.
You really don't need someone else's voice shoved in your brain every waking moment. Screw them. Listen to yourself for a while.
Hey guys, if you want, check this out...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQmOGOgaiOk
This is a video about the SoundExchange. Might be a good place to post your opinion.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Want they don't want is people turning to legal alternatives.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
"That's 70% of projected revenue for Pandora"
Maybe thats high, but it seems less steep once you realize that 100% of their business is based on profiting off of other people's work. We often critique the record labels for being unable to find a business model that works, yet most of these Web 2.0 companies will fail once it comes time to actually pay the musicians for the work that draws the traffic to their websites in the first place.
The more I think about this the more I think I could find a reasonable (to me) method.
I suppose that, in my mind at least, it would be "okay" if they were to charge a flat percentage of the profit that the companies made from their streaming services. I'll throw an arbitrary 20% of the profit number out there.
Sites without ads or make no revenue would pay 20% of their profit regardless.
Particularly well earning companies could negotiate for a smaller percentage or even make it a tiered scale without negotiation required.
Hell, companies losing money might even negotiate a deal where they're actually paid to advertise the media's varied projects/clients.
Ah well, caveat emptor.
Side note: I say these things as a guitarist who's not actually in a band or anything but was quite active in the music scene for a lot of years.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You guys are missing the boat.
Who cares about choosing who gets to be the next big thing? -- although it's an interesting diversion.
This is about "correcting" the public opinion through controlled "art".
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Sincerely,
Disgruntled
The solution is simple, if draconian: stop playing music that isn't available royalty-free. And then either the royalty mafia notes the loss of the advertising force that comes from a wide listener base, and changes their grasping ways... or we all develop different tastes in music, and life goes on without royalty-impaired music.
In fact, here's a handy link to Digital Gunfire's royalty release form (used by permission):
http://www.digitalgunfire.com/radioplayrelease.rtf
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
This reminded me of how awesome pandora was until they had to shut down streaming to non-US IPs. Anyone know of a good proxy or ten?
Why not true things up between local radio and internet? Charge for the potential audience a broadcast can have. Make it fair across all mediums like broadcast and internet. Let them use advertising however they need to, to make profit and pay for what they play? How about a flat (FAIR) rate so that all of them can have an affective business rather than punishing one over the others? Although it makes me sick that the record companies might be making more profit from local radio, I think it's unfair that they pay nothing while satellite pays a fee, and internet broadcasts pay even more. If a local station has 30 thousand listeners, and satellite has 200K, and the internet site has 2 Mil, then everyone pays, and everyone gets a slice of the copyright pie. Why do they have to make this all so complicated? Don't answer that. I'm assuming they are looking to squeeze the biggest audience for the biggest profit. It's the record industry. They are nothing but a bunch of bloody leeches on societies ass.
Its called a podcast and I've been doing it for years.
Live is definitely not necessary. In fact "live" is a drawback.
I have hundreds of hours of episodes of my show available on a server.
The protocols are MP3 and m4a. (and if you want to do video, you can do that too.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Satellite radio pays about 6-7% of their gross revenues to SoundExchange as their royalty rate. It's a bit more complex than that, because they have lots of "exceptions" to the gross revenue that the royalties are not calculated on (e.g. licensing fees from hardware manufacturers) but it comes down to about 6% of their gross revenues. The "hourly" numbers mentioned in that article are extrapolated based on Arbitrons sat radio ratings which show hourly usage details on sat radio: because obviously most subscribers don't listen to sat radio 24x7.
Smaller internet radio operators (and many of the larger ones that only do radio) are pushing for a percentage of revenue option as well. In the past, small webcasters with less than 1.25 mil in revenue were allowed to pay a sliding scale of 10-12% of their gross revenues. SoundExchange offered to extend that offer to small webcasters but only those who stream to less than an average of about 6800 simultaneous listeners (which translates to 5 million total listener hours a month). This disqualifies a lot of small internet broadcasters like DI.FM, Club977, AccuRadio and SomaFM, who would be considered "large broadcasters" under this proposed settlement.
The Internet Radio Equality Act looks to set the rate at 7.5% which is still higher than what other countries pay, but will not put US webcasters out of business.
The old small webcaster agreement was 7% of a webcasters expenses or 10-12% of the gross revenues, whichever was higher.
The RIAA explicitly doesn't want radio services operating at a loss or with no revenue and then "giving their music away". They don't want to see broadcasters "give away music". They want to see broadcasters make lots of revenue that they can get a part of.
They're particularly annoyed that Last.FM was sold for $200+ million, which they use as their example of a company that had years of no revenue while they built their audience share, only to then make a ton of money when they sold out. (It's a lame argument, but it's one they consistently make to congress whenever they can.)
Once Deezer gets some traction in the US, SoundExchange and the RIAA will go after them- it currently doesn't matter where you're broadcasting from, it matters where you're broadcasting TO. That's why Pandora stopped streaming to the EU. Deezer will have to do the same to the US once they get on SoundExchange's radar.
Shutting them down is a harder thing to do, but they're still liable for royalties here in the US.
The bottom line is that the Royalty situation in the US is stupid and totally holding back online music. There are rules in the DMCA that say you can't play a song on-demand (unless you have negotiated direct licenses with the record labels). Pandora has to put all these legal workarounds into their system. That's why you can't skip more than a certain number of songs, and why you can't hear a particular song when you want to. It's not that Pandora's system sucks, it's that they're working around these rules that suck.
It is not practical to administer legal agreements with every artists you would play over the radio station. That's why the "statutory license" concept exists. Broadcasters WANT the license. We are just not happy with the price that has been mandated for that license.
We play music from at least 400 different labels. And 10,000+ artists. We'd have to have a full-time legal department to track all those contracts.
But it is still true that SX is the mandatory collector. As a rightsholder (e.g. label or artists that owns their own copyrights), you can license outside of SX, but anyone else can still play your music as long as they're paying SX.
If a rightsholder opts-out of SX, they're just giving SX their royalty money. As an artist, there is no reason NOT to collect any money you're due from SX.
The FM radio lobby is extremely powerful and they conspired to use the royalty fees to drive the internet radio out of the market.
That's not correct. The terrestrial broadcasters (AM/FM) had nothing to do with this royalty- because it affects their streaming as well. And I don't know if you have noticed, but CBS and Clear Channel are the overall biggest sttreamers out there according to Webcast Metrics. They oppose these royalties as well.
And don't forget that the RIAA how has a bill introduced to put a royalty on their over the air broadcasts.
The royalties are all driven by the big RIAA labels who more than anything want control over what is broadcast. By setting royalties high, they make it so that webcasters have to make direct deals with them, and part of those deals is featuring the content the big labels want featured. It's like Payola the labels don't have to pay for. So you can see what the big draw of these royalties are.
Last summer we had Senators and Congresmen that were standing up to the RIAA and CRB against obsessive royalties to internet Radio Stations and Streaming Web Sites! What happened did the RIAA offer these politicians some lobbiest Payola and now they are not standing up to the RIAA? What the RIAA and their corporate Record Labels are practicing is Corporate Facism as they are trying to monopolize the whole music and media industry to themselves by cutting out any independent radio, TV media and musician media so they are able to dictate what you are allowed to listen to and purchase by not giving you a choice! They must be members of the Fourth REICH! The RIAA and CRB have to go folks as you will have no Peace in obtaining your preferences of entertainment until you have successfully shut down their authority in the USA! They are stepping on your rights and freedoms and have totally no regard for freedom of speech or the right for citizens to choose where they want to listen to those speeches, info and entertainment from! Tell, telephone, write and email all your government reps and inform them if they don't get rrid of the RIAA - that you will get rid of their government services this election! kriff3
I may get flamed for this, but I read the Wash Post article and came away thinking, where the hell was the business model? Heck yeah I enjoy Pandora, I can listen to Ry Cooder and stuff like him all day. But Westergren chose to take VC money, and so took something really cool and had to figure out how to make it a business. Crying about satellite and over the air radio misses the point -- what entrenched business is EASY to take on? Compare Pandora to iTunes -- love or hate, they thought it through, changed the industry and single-handedly brought back the single. And will eventually be a conduit straight from artist to consumer, bypassing the labels. When you run to Congress to save you, you're cooked. Too bad the Post article couldn't raise any of these issues. I'll get a post up about this eventually: http://cparente.wordpress.com/
There's always accuradio. http://www.accuradio.com
I actually run an internet radio station based in the UK. Here the licensing laws are so old that there isn't even an internet based license. In our experience they'll through a fee at us for different podcast projects (this is how we make money although we are moving to ad & sponsor based revenue model) and we have to argue them down and then seek licensing permission from the artist or label individually. Now for an internet radio station that would obviously be impossible as most of your working day would be chasing down license approvals from labels.
Instead our approach is to wait until they have something that is manageable and actually built for internet radio stations & podcasts. Then we'll pay. Thankfully we're well under the radar in respects to Last fm & Pandora but if things go the way we want them to then it won't be long before someone comes knocking and if we get our fingers burnt we'll have to scrap it.
I don't think things will go the same way as they have in the US. Mainly because Clear Channel hasn't bought up all our commercial stations and also partly because PRS and MCPS (UK licensing bodies) haven't got a clue about what to do with the internet. To be honest I'm surprised they have a website.
Good luck to our indie internet compadres in the US. If you want to jump ship and come to the UK you can all kip on my couch for a bit.
You would think it wasn't affected, but the truth of the matter is Talk Radio is also required to pay a per listener fee to Soundexchange for broadcasting over the Internet. It's slightly lower, but still required. The thought process is they might play music that is commercial. Given RIAA logic, that means they must pay all the time.
That is why NPR fought so hard to prevent the higher Royalty Rates. They knew it would kill the growing Internet side of their broadcast.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=370346
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070320-npr-fights-back-seeks-rehearing-on-internet-radio-royalty-increases.html
I ran two Internet Radio stations myself. I have already shut one down and I am debating shutting the second one down. The whole situation makes me sick at my stomach. I use to love music, but not any more.
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
Well, thanks for the information! I thought no music=exempt. That is just quite strange and obviously seriously wrong. If I ever do my own talk station (which I plan on doing as soon as broadband is available at my location), I'd tell them to take a walk and fight it as far as I can.
if you like Pandora, try Slacker (www.slacker.com)...better personalization and portability....and they arent going away.
We recently launched an internet radio platform (with a business model) called Highnote. For listeners, it's a machine-learning driven music discovery engine (highnoteradio.com), but at the core is a business model based on a promotional platform designed specifically for streaming music. Labels and independent artists get promotional exposure for their new music in the most natural way â" played directly after artists that are similar. Ex: I am an artist that cites Coldplay and U2 as influences, I can get my track played into streams after users hear songs by Coldplay and U2. As an artist trying to build a fan base, I only pay for qualified traffic to my web site or MySpace page, where I sell music & merchandise directly. The crucial thing here is that revenue is cost-per-click based rather than cost-per-play, so a) bands/labels pay only for qualified traffic to their web sites, which they monetize directly via music & merchandise sales and b) the listener experience is optimized by setting thresholds for click-through rates.