» The View from Paradise Save Our Internet Radio: Don?t let the RIAA silence your favorite Internet radio station!
If you listen to Internet Radio at all, you have probably already seen this. But in case you have not, then read Radio Paradise's The View from Paradise Save Our Internet Radio: Don?t let the RIAA silence your favorite Internet radio station! which is the owner's latest post regarding the current state of Internet Radio.
In a nutshell, the copyright office has decided that Internet Radio stations should pay money on a per-listener basis for the songs they play. The catch? Regular, terrestial radio does not have to pay these amounts. No, terrestial radio pays a performace license to one of BMI, ASCAP, or (to a lesser extent) SESAC. These groups collect the royalties from radio stations, bars, arenas, etc. based on how much they play the music, and then distribute them based upon the ratio of how much the artists are played in relation to one another. Simple, right? Well, simple and complicated, just like the rest of the music industry. But, at least it is relatively straightforward and allows the artists to make money, as well as the radio stations. With the new Copyright office determination, most of the Internet Radio stations will be forced to pay a significant portion of their proceeds just for royalty rates. And by "significant", I mean more than 100% in many cases.
Now does that make sense? Let us think about this for a second. If you decide to tax, say, a restaurant, and you decide that they should have to pay, say $25 for every diner that comes into the restaurant, what happens then? It does not take a genius or much thinking to realize that the restaurants you patronize most often will be forced to either close or raise their prices by an enormous margin. Hey, al of a sudden Wendy's costs $37 for a spicy chicken sandwich. I mean, it is no $100 burger, but they could probably weather the $10 tax. Heck, they could even make the same amount of money as long as they cancel the contribution to the make-a-wish foundation.
Hmm, and this just after the CEO of Sirius/XM testified that they had plenty of competition from other media sources. Interesting.
In a nutshell, the copyright office has decided that Internet Radio stations should pay money on a per-listener basis for the songs they play. The catch? Regular, terrestial radio does not have to pay these amounts. No, terrestial radio pays a performace license to one of BMI, ASCAP, or (to a lesser extent) SESAC. These groups collect the royalties from radio stations, bars, arenas, etc. based on how much they play the music, and then distribute them based upon the ratio of how much the artists are played in relation to one another. Simple, right? Well, simple and complicated, just like the rest of the music industry. But, at least it is relatively straightforward and allows the artists to make money, as well as the radio stations. With the new Copyright office determination, most of the Internet Radio stations will be forced to pay a significant portion of their proceeds just for royalty rates. And by "significant", I mean more than 100% in many cases.
Now does that make sense? Let us think about this for a second. If you decide to tax, say, a restaurant, and you decide that they should have to pay, say $25 for every diner that comes into the restaurant, what happens then? It does not take a genius or much thinking to realize that the restaurants you patronize most often will be forced to either close or raise their prices by an enormous margin. Hey, al of a sudden Wendy's costs $37 for a spicy chicken sandwich. I mean, it is no $100 burger, but they could probably weather the $10 tax. Heck, they could even make the same amount of money as long as they cancel the contribution to the make-a-wish foundation.
Hmm, and this just after the CEO of Sirius/XM testified that they had plenty of competition from other media sources. Interesting.
posted by Kevin T. Neely at 9:49 PM
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