Net radio music royalties soar
p2pnet.net news:- Details on royalties to be paid by Net radio stations for streaming music for 2006-2010 have been released by the US Copyright Royalty Board.
“And the rates are going up significantly over the next few years,” says David Oxenford on Broadcast Law Blog.
“This is scary,” says Richard in a comment post. “I would rise from $140 a month combined in a group license to $1,500 a month to Soundexchange alone!
“NO breaks for small webcasters! Uggg. And retro-active.”
Oxenford, “explains that the 2007 rate essentially translates to one-tenth of a penny per song per listener,” says Radio Ink. “Extrapolating from there, a webcaster will have to pay one penny for every ten listeners who hear a single song.”
Meanwhile, on the inccrease, “More importantly, especially for smaller entities, there are no royalty rates based on a percentage of revenue as were in effect for small webcasters under the Small Webcasters Settlement Act,” says Oxenford, going on:
“Instead, all royalties are given as a per performance number, i.e. a payment for each song every time a listener hears that song.”
Broadcast Law says the Board essentially adopted the royalty rate advanced by SoundExchange (the collective that receives the royalties and distributes the money to copyright holders and performers) in the litigation. It denied all proposals for a percentage of revenue royalty (including a proposal that SoundExchange itself advanced). The Board also rejected any premium for streams received by a wireless service, as SoundExchange had suggested.”
The rates, “for commercial webcasters, including broadcasters retransmitting their over-the-air signals on the Internet,” as posted on Broadcast Law, are:
2006 – $.0008 per performance
2007 – $.0011 per performance
2008 – $.0014 per performance
2009 – $.0018 per performance
2010 – $.0019 per performance
The minimum fee is $500 per channel per year, says Oxenford, pointing out there’s no clear definition of what a “channel” is for services that make up individualized playlists for listeners.
For noncommercial webcasters, the fee will be $500 per channel, for up to 159,140 Aggregate Tuning Hours (one listener listening for an hour) per month. Noncommercial webcasters who exceed that level pay at the commercial rate for all listening in excess of that limit.
Also See:
Broadcast Law Blog – Copyright Royalty Board Releases Decision – Rates are Going Up Significantly, March 2, 2007
Radio Ink – New Copyright Fees Set For Internet Radio, March 3, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:26 pm
You think that’s scarey?
Scarey is going to be the RIAA trying to figure out how to bill all these stations.
Have you seen the amount of on-line stations?
add to that the many countries there in.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
It will be like p2p, U.S. on-line stations will be put out of business and non U.S. stations will tell them to fuck off.