Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick and Roll
Help me out here.......
"I just want to get back to helping webcasters get business and figuring out how get more ad revenue," said Johnie Floater, general manager of media at Live365. "We've been spending all of our time playing lawyers and lobbyists."
I read this quote and it sounds to me that Live365 is fighting to use music for free to enable internet radio to make profits.
You see the inconsistency? This is not the same fight we have. Not only are we non-profit (which doesn't mean non-exempt from this) but we do this for no reason but to have fun. We do not sell ad space! We play music.
While I think that Sound Exchange is reprehensible in their tactics, they do have a valid point. And in the end, I cannot see how Live 365 can say this and expect not to get whacked.
So by association, we will eventually be swept into whatever happens with the "big boys". And that's a shame - we're HELPING artists and that's it!
So watch a good thing be forever dissolved, while your kids steal music and hurt artists.
Lovely!
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To my knowledge nobody is arguing that they should be able to stream music without paying the publishers/artists for using their content, but rather that there is a large disparity between terrestrial radio which only pays publisher fees (paid to songwriters & publishers of the original tune), satellite radio which pays publisher fees as well as 7.5% of profits as artist fees (which pays the performer of the tune regardless of whether they wrote it) and internet broadcasters which have been hit by the vastly more onerous fees that have caused the current furor. The point is that there should be a level playing field regardless of broadcast medium. Your point regarding whether the station profits being a deciding factor in usage fees may have some validity and we can hope some provisions are made to help out non-profit broadcasters like AM, but the larger issue is the difference in fee structure based on the transmission medium IMHO.
It seems to me that SoundExchange (and therefore the RIAA and therefore the large media companies) are just trying to shut internet radio down because they can't control it. Pretty much anybody can be an internet radio broadcaster, it has a much lower barrier to entry as the business folks say, due to much simpler transmission equipment and no need to license frequency spectrum. So the current entrenched regime is fearful because they see their oligopoly slipping away. At least that's what it looks like to my eyes.
It seems to me like a basic charge of $500/year + 7.5% of profits might be a reasonable across the board fee rate, that way artists get paid by everybody, non-profits just pay a flat $500/year and the for-profit big stations share their profits and the artists get exposure as well. If this were used for all broadcast media it seems it would be a fair system IMHO. I guess stations would need to keep some kind of track play count as well so SoundExchange would know how to divvy up the fees from each station.