I posted a couple of weeks ago about the draconian fee structure about to be put into place for royalty payments by streaming radio stations. It seems that some heavy hitters are bothered by the new rules:

A wide array of broadcasters and online companies on Monday challenged a ruling from a panel of copyright judges that they say could cripple the emerging business of offering music broadcasts over the Internet.

Clear Channel Communications Inc., National Public Radio, and groups representing both large and small companies providing music broadcasts online were among those asking the Copyright Royalty Board to reconsider key parts of its March 2 ruling. [More…]

With the money behind these players, there is some hope that the RIAA et al will not be able to shove these new rule down the ‘little guys’ throats.

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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 2009

At 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.

Tags: News, Music, Advocacy, RIAA | 2 Comments »