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I stopped on over to George Leite’s Catholic Rockers webpage and was struck by this awesome pic.
Now this is one cool dude!
Make sure to check out his web site, podcast (link to rss feed), and Catholic Jukebox streaming radio channel.
What doesn’t this guy do?
A sobering article from save-internet-radio.com about a new draconian fee structure from our friends at the RIAA. To be clear, this subject relates to radio station that stream their content (not saved to your hard-drive) and not podcasts.
If the RIAA and SoundExchange get their way, independent webcasting / Internet radio will soon cease to exist.
Why? Earlier today, the Copyright Royalty Board, the group overseeing statutory licensing for US-based internet radio stations, announced the new royalty rates for streaming radio performance rights. The board rejected the arguments made by webcasters and instead chose to adopt the proposal put forth by industry-backed SoundExchange, a royalty fee collection agency created by the RIAA.
The new rates are based on “performances” of songs. A “performance” is defined as one song being streamed to a single listener. In other words, a station with 1000 listeners is charged for 1000 performances of each song it broadcasts.
Further, the new rates, just announced today, are retroactive to 2006, and increase rapidly each year. The rates per performance are as follows:
$0.0008 in 2006
$0.0011 in 2007
$0.0014 in 2008
$0.0018 in 2009At first glance, those seem like fairly small numbers: eight ten-thousandths of a dollar, eleven ten-thousandths of a dollar, and so on. When you actually do the math, however, you see the truth revealed. The average radio station plays 16 songs in an hour. Under this system, that would be equivalent to 16 performances.
0.0011 x 16 = 0.0176
Still a fairly small number - under two cents. But now assume this station has 1000 listeners. That means that, in one hour, the station would be billed for 16,000 performances.
0.0011 x 16000 = 17.60
That’s $17.60 an hour. Now we’re starting to see how expensive this truly is. Multiply that by 24 hours a day.
17.60 * 24 = 422.40
$422.40 a day. But there’s 365 days in a year.
422.40 * 365 = 154176
$154,176 for the year in performance royalties alone for a station with 1000 listeners. And that’s just for 2007: it gets even worse. In 2008, the cost rises to $193,536 for the year. In 2009, it goes up to $248,832. Even for a much smaller station, the royalties owed are huge. [More…]
Why anyone would purchase music by any artist represented by this Mafia-esque organization is beyond me.
I’d sure love to hear from ‘Catholic Jukebox’ on this one.
You can almost hear the screams of “he’s a witch burn him”. Even Microsoft, that itself has two different, non-compatible, DRM standards is piling on.
From Podcasting News, several responses to Steve Jobs’ call for doing away with DRM:
“While Steve Jobs call for the record labels to end DRM has been warmly received around the world, his remarks’ reception from competitors and the labels themselves has been downright chilly.
Executives at the major labels dismiss Jobs’ challenge, saying that eliminating DRM isn’t going to happen. The marketing director for Microsoft’s struggling Zune portable media player brand dismisses Jobs’ remarks “irresponsible.”
The Universal Music Group, the Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment have declined to comment. But several industry executives said they viewed Mr. Jobs’s comments as an effort to deflect anti-DRM criticism from Apple.
Apple has been challenged recently in several European companies because of the lack of interoperability between iTunes and other portable media players. Its copy-protection has been ruled illegal in Norway, and Holland and other countries are challenging the company, too.
Based on the music industry’s response, though, don’t expect an end to DRM anytime soon…”
“While Steve Jobs may have a vision for the future of digital music, Warner Music isn’t buying it. The company said on Thursday it will keep anti-piracy copy protection for digital songs sold on services such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes Music Store. The company’s comments come two days after Apple Inc.’s chief executive Steve Jobs called on the four major music companies to drop digital rights management software as a way to boost digital sales.
Warner Music chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. said in a call with analysts that the argument to drop copy protection also known as digital rights management (DRM) is “without logic and merit. We will not abandon DRM.”
I for one think Steve Jobs is a witch, once he turned me into a newt. . . well, I got better!
I have been listening to a lot more podcasts lately. My sister got an iPod Nano when she bought her Powerbook and promptly decided the Nano was “too complicated”. Being a top-notch opportunist, I asked if I could borrow it. I was immediately impressed by the ease of use, quality sound, and small size.
When I got home I had to reformat the Nano for Windows (which iTunes did for me - no sweat). I then began to explore the land of iTunes + iPod. I found it to be a happy, happy place. I own an iRiver. While I like the unit very much, the interface with Windows Media Player is a nightmare. I have resisted the iPod, but just as in the classic movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, once you fall asleep with a ‘pod’, you are never the same.
I digress. As I was tooling around the Religion and Spirituality section of iTunes, I happened across a show entitled ‘The Bored Again Christian‘. It is a music podcast with the following description:
“The BAC plays Christian music for people who are tired of Christian music. Just Pete spins the best boring Christian music. Yawn”.
The tag for the show is: “Where Christian music gets saved”.
I was intrigued. I gave it a listen. What I encountered was a well-produced show, with affable host Just Pete (some of you may remember him from the pod-faded ‘Illinoise!’ which he hosted with his wife ‘NASA Janet’). The music is a mix of grunge, alternative, and edgy pop. It is a pure music show, with only occasional break-ins by the host. It is a very good show. It remains on my subscription list.
I was tooling around the about.com podcast section and I tripped upon an interview with Just Pete. It gave a great insight into the personality behind the cast. It is worth a read, even if you never listen to the cast. He states something that is worth hearing here at DwM:
“The purpose of this ministry [his podcast] has always been to celebrate truly inspired Christian art, where much of Christian music has been mediocre art with a positive message. And that is what is unique about the podcast: the art IS the message.”
Again the podcast and interview are worth a listen and a look respectively.
Website: http://www.boredagainchristian.com/
I was reading the latest issue of Fast Company. It’s an innovative business magazine. You should check it out. The cover article is about one company’s creation of an ongoing disruption in the business model of major record labels, venue agencies such as Ticket Master, bands, fan clubs, and sellers of band related merchandise.
There are some lessons to be gleaned regarding podcasting. I have included the first bit below. You can read the entire article on the Fast Company site:
“If there’s any musician who can make sense of the tectonic upheaval in the industry, it’s John Legend. Before teaming with Kanye West and Snoop Dogg on his major-label debut, Get Lifted, the ultrasmooth R&B singer-songwriter worked as an associate consultant for the Boston Consulting Group (under his given name, John Stephens). When the recording sold north of 3 million copies worldwide–and snagged a trio of 2006 Grammys, including best new artist–John Stephens the consultant had some cautionary words for John Legend the musician: Protect your brand. It was some of the best advice he’d ever gotten.
Backup Player Coran Capshaw rarely steps from behind the curtain.
He built his company to help artists like John Legend supercharge
their brands and businesses.
Unsung Masses Just some of Musictoday’s 200 employees.
Many are musicians themselves, including Nathan Hubbard
(at lower right), who runs day-to-day operations. All of them
are rabid fans.
people would be lining up to take a piece of every dollar he could pull down, and that if he went the traditional route, there wasn’t much he could do to stop them. After all, it was the label, retailers, and ticket companies in the sweet spot at the center of every transaction with his fans. “I can’t let someone else have more control over the relationship people have with my music than I do,” he says.
So Legend took control in a way that would have been unthinkable for a new artist just 10 years ago. He still releases music through a major label, Sony BMG (NYSE:SNE), but last fall he formed John Legend Ventures with two friends and began researching how other bands were creating their own businesses and increasing their leverage in the market.” [More…]
Since January 6, 2000 Catholicjukebox.com Radio has been streaming
Catholic contemporary music over the Internet 24 hours a day, seven
days a week.
“When I started this project” says George Leite, owner of
Catholicjukebox.com, “there was no place you could go to hear
contemporary Catholic music. There were plenty of place to hear music
from the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) market, but those radio
stations wouldn’t play music by Catholic artists.”
Bands from all over the world started sending CDs to George, who put
them together and started broadcasting from the servers at Live365.com.
Then listeners from all over the world started listening. Besides the
U.S., in the last 30 days, listeners have been from Canada, Mexico,
Sweden, Poland, Singapore, Brazil, Czech Republic,Netherlands, United
Kingdom, Malaysia, Australia, Latvia, Ireland, Germany and Romania.
“I am trying to take the radio station to the next level” said
Leite, “with better sound quality, more live programs and a larger
playlist of songs. Catholic music has continued to get better, and
Catholic music radio needs to keep up.”
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From the January 2nd Wall Street Journal:
By Ethan Smith
After two years of hesitancy, the music industry is finally taking its first steps toward embracing podcasting.
When podcasts attained prominence in 2004, amateurs and advertisers alike heralded the downloadable audio programs as the next step in the evolution of broadcasting. But they have failed to make headway in one key area: music programming.
For a variety of reasons — including fear of piracy and the need to be paid — the major record labels and music publishers that control the rights to about 75% of the commercially released music in the U.S. have refused to make deals that would allow songs to be used in podcasts. Consequently, podcasts have been blocked from using this music, at least legitimately. That has stopped music-oriented radio programming from being available as podcasts.
![[Photo]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/MK-AH796_PODCAS_20070101191603.jpg) |
| Johnny Cash |
That is starting to change. San Francisco-based Rock River Communications Inc. has struck some of the first deals to license major-label content for podcasts. Rock River, which specializes in making the mix CDs sold at the check-out counters of retailers like Gap Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc.’s Pottery Barn, is creating a series of promotional podcasts on behalf of corporate clients including DaimlerChrysler AG and Ford Motor Co.
Chrysler and Ford pay Sony BMG Music Entertainment — the joint venture of Sony Corp. and Germany’s Bertelsmann AG — a flat fee, which the companies decline to disclose, for the right to distribute the podcasts for a year, regardless of how many or how few copies are downloaded. Users can keep the programs on their personal computers or MP3 players indefinitely.
“What we’re doing with podcasts is taking the King Biscuit Flower Hour notion of sponsored content,” says Rock River President and Chief Executive Jeff Daniel. He is referring to a popular
radio program in the 1970s and ’80s that was sponsored by a regional baking-products company called King Biscuit Flour. “It’s a patronage model.”
Thanks to a tangle of legal and financial problems, record labels have been slow to license their music for podcasts. For starters, podcasts are almost all delivered in the MP3 format, which includes none of the special software that other digital-music formats use to prevent wholesale copying. That has contributed to podcasts’ popularity by making it simple to disseminate them and load them onto any digital music player, not just iPods. But it has also made music companies uneasy, since they have in nearly all cases insisted that online music sellers wrap their files in copy-protection software.
The other major hurdle facing podcasts has been the difficulty of figuring out how labels and artists should be paid. Many podcasts are free, like broadcast or Internet radio; but because of key differences between those media and podcasting, the performance rights royalties that are collected from broadcasters don’t apply to podcasts. Plus, given that many podcasters are do-it-yourselfers who give their content away, it isn’t even clear where those royalties might come from.
For now, Rock River has struck licensing deals only with Sony BMG, to include four to eight songs in podcasts created on behalf of its clients. The “Chrysler Music Legends” series focuses on a specific artist in each program, and includes 30-second ads from the car maker at a few points in the program. Subjects of the biographical programs have included Miles Davis, Johnny Cash and Journey.
The programs are available from Chrysler’s home page and from the podcasting section of Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store. The Ford series isn’t due to launch until later this month, but Rock River executives say they are in discussions to license content from multiple major labels.
Licensing music for podcasting has long been a source of internal debate at music labels. Many executives argue that it is worth handing over some content to spur consumer interest, while others maintain that the companies erode the value of their product by knowingly allowing it to be freely downloaded and copied.
Ted Cohen, a digital-media strategist who for many years was an executive at EMI Group PLC, says that keeping up-and-coming artists “protected” from use in podcasts has often backfired. “We’ve protected them so well nobody knows they exist,” he quips.
Adam Block, senior vice president and general manager of Sony BMG’s Legacy Recordings, says the podcasts are “essentially a movie trailer for our projects.” He says the possibility of the shows’ being copied wasn’t much of a concern because the songs are embedded within a long program that would be difficult to redistribute.
Write to Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com
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I have been working to re-engage my brain over tyesterday and today. Yesterday I
was fairly successful, today, however, I am floundering. I have had a couple of conference calls and I am pretty much spent.
I decided to start weeding through my in box. I am sure I am the only one who does this, but when I am busy, I will often just glance at my new email and if it is something that is interesting, but does not demand immediate attention, I will keep it there and try to get back to it. Well, Carlos sent me something on Dec. 12th and I just got around to spend some time with it.
In his email to me Carlos brought a video featured on Sarah Bauer’s video web page to my attention. It is of some behind the scenes footage of her and her band preparing for a concert. It runs about five minutes and gives us a peak at some of what goes into her shows but more importantly, help us get to know the people. It is a small story.
It is a good example of what is possible. Catholic audio and video does not have to be about talking heads. It is worth a look.
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This is easily the coolest technology I’ve seen in years: Go to the Creative Commons search page. Click on the OWL Music Search
tab. (Depending upon the browser, you might need to run a fake search
to get it to come alive — we’re working on this, but just
type anything in the search bar). You’ll then see OWL’s
Music Search interface. Drop an MP3 on OWL. It will analyze it and show
you similar sounding Creative Commons licensed music. You select the part of the song you want to match; it finds the closest match it can find.
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The About.com website has launched a podcasting section. I have poked around and there is a lot of content there. One section that caught my attention is the one containing content for musicians called Podcast Musician Case Study: Build Community With Your Podcast. The case study is really an interview with members of the indie band Uncle Seth. It is an interesting look at how one group is using podcasting not only to sell music, but to build community.
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