The Government Hates Podcasts - digg this
According to RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter the Copyright Royalty Board has set the royalty rates for webcasting music. It will be $0.0008 per performance (defined as the streaming of one song to one listener) retroactive to the beginning of '06 and will be raised to $.0019 per performance by 2010.
This will probably kill sites like Pandora. To make those numbers real for you,
According to the comScore Arbitron ratings report for November 2006, the AOL Radio Network had a average audience ("AQH") between 6AM and Midnight of 210,694 listeners. Multiplied by about 16 songs per hour, 18 hours per day, and 31 days per month, plus adding an additional 10% to account for overnight (Mid-6AM) listening, suggests that AOL played about 2.1 billion songs that month. At the CRB's royalty rate ($0.0008 per play), I'm guessing that would create a royalty obligation to SoundExchange for the month of November of about $1.65 million. Annualized, that's about $20 million for 2006.
And it will be over double that in three years. Greedy sons of satan. So Gizmodo recommends boycotting the RIAA this month. That means doing some research and if you want to know where you can go to get RIAA free music then check this out. Will it work? Probably not., but it might feel good.
Total Number of Comments: 5
I saw this in the WSJ. What was really irjsome is that broadcast radio pays no such royalties. Zero. Nada.
What's up with that?
The recording industry is regulating itself out of relevance.
(BTW - Great to see another personal blog on Movable Type!)
I love MT. Of course my prior attampt was on blogger and anything would seem to be a step up.
And I was sure that radio has to pay something based on what they play.
Maybe I read or remembered it wrong.
I've been using MT for about 3 years. Let me know if you need any tips.
BTW - Typekey isn't working. I suspect it's taht you don't have a Typekey Authentication Token or it's entered wrong.
Regarding Typekey, hurmph. I'll diddle with it more and see if I can get it working.
My main project right now is creating a good space using MT for pictures.
Have you looked at the Photogallery plugin for MT? I'm using it to create my own photogallery (which I really need to link to from my main blog site).
I have a minor issue with text alignment on the individual pages in IE7, but other than that it produces very nice galleries.