Another blow
March 7th, 2007 RachelWe started off the year with high hopes and all sorts of conferences, panels, and pumped up discussions about where the digital music industry was headed and, boy oh boy, this was going to be the year.
Steve wrote a letter - we all (well most of us, the none skeptical us) cheered.
Then things really warmed up - with reports that EMI was going to open up and go for mp3 format. “Score!” we all said…+1,000,000 google results later…the real stipulations/clauses/hoops became clear. Bummer.
Now…this. And this sucks.
I don’t even know what to say - but I’ll start off, and end, with where you can get involved. From Dave:
On March 2, 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board approved new music royalty rates for Internet Radio stations that have the potential to bury independent webcasters by substantially increasing royalty rates. Left unchanged, the new rates could force stations like Party107 and many others to pay thousands of dollars per month in music royalties to just one of the several agencies that stations are required to pay. The new rates also increase in future years. 2007’s rates are a 37.5% increase over 2006, 2008 and 2009’s rates increase by about 28% per year, and the rates increase another 5.5% in 2010. These unreasonable music royalty costs (not including other legal obligations, stream servers, and bandwidth costs) may drive many independent webcasters who have been operating legally for years off the air.
Yes, they’re fractions of pennies. That add up to whole pennies. And millions of users later quickly turn into a fledgling start up not being able to pay their bills.
Tim, over at Pandora says…
We are striving very hard to build a business. We employ eleven full time people in our ad sales team, and despite very high licensing and streaming costs, believed that we could make it work over the next several years if internet advertising continues to grow. This ruling drives the licensing fees (fees that are NOT paid by terrestrial broadcasters) completely out of reach, and makes our goal impossible.
This is a terribly ill-conceived attempt to crush a powerful and positive grassroots movement that is sweeping across the music world. The record labels’ struggles have nothing to do with online radio and killing it will further hurt their business, not help it.
Your making strides, your making strides, and all of a sudden that dangling carrot is yanked out of view and blown up in a microwave. Just awful.
SO, as I said - get involved. Your not helpless, you have a voice.
