[wordup] The Death of Web Radio

[Adam Shand]

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>

BTW I still listen to my beloved kpig "cyberpork radio" in Calif and I 
don't know if you know about this, but it's a further RIAA depradation.

From: http://www.kpig.com/?content=web_radio

What Listeners Can Do:

We're trying to get the facts of this situation known to the public and
to members of congress. You can help by writing a personal letter to
newspaper and magazine writers, TV news directors & reporters. Detail
your personal concerns about this issue and, if you want, cut and paste
the following summary of the situation and add it to the end of the
message. We suggest contacting individual editors and writers that you
know or respect. You can generally find their email addresses on the
publication or station's website.

Letters to the editor (which must be entirely original and not contain
any pasted material) can also be sent to your local daily & weekly
papers. In both cases we recommend that you send a copy of your message
to all of your congressional representatives. See congress.org for email
addresses. A copy via fax or snail mail is also recommended, since those
often carry more weight than email.

A group of concerned webcasters is setting up a resource website. That
address will be published here as soon as it's available.

The Death of Web Radio?

The US Copyright Office is in the final stages of approving a fee
structure for Internet radio stations that could easily shut down many
of the Internet's most-listened-to & most loved stations.

The fees in question are royalties to the sound recording copyright
owner - which have never been paid by broadcast radio, but are due in
the case of digital transmissions under the terms of the DMCA (Digital
Millennium Copyright Act). The stations in jeopardy are those run by
individuals or small business, rather than large corporate interests.

Unfortunately, the CARP (Copyright Arbitration Royalty Proceeding) that
evaluated this issue has come up with a set of recommendations that are
tailored to a marketplace that never came to be: one dominated by large
webcast operations generating huge profits derived from advertising
revenue. Instead, in 2002 we find that those revenue projections were
(in retrospect) irrationally exuberant, and most of the large webcast
firms are out of business. Webcasting is dominated instead by stations
like ours: with rapidly growing, passionately enthusiastic audiences but
very little revenue, supported in great part out of the owners' pockets
and through listener contributions.

We webcasters realize that we can't expect the free ride that
broadcasters enjoy on the issue of sound recording copyright royalties.
We are willing to pay the royalties, particularly when they actually
benefit the artists rather than the record labels they are beholden to.
However, there's a big problem with the existing proposal. In most cases
such royalties are based on a share of revenue. This method has worked
very well for decades in the collection of the songwriters' royalties
that are paid by both broadcasters & webcasters, as well as bars,
restaurants, background music services, and others. The CARP
recommendation, however, requires a per-use royalty. Each time a song is
played, the station must pay $0.0014 for each listener that is tuned in.

The RIAA (the trade organization that represents record companies)
proposed that webcasters pay either a rather large share of revenue
(15%) or a per-listen fee. DiMA (which represented the large webcast
operations) attempted to protect the interests of its members (who,
remember, expected to soon be generating huge profits from their
webcasts) by recommending that the arbitration panel reject the revenue
share method in favor of a much smaller per-listen fee. Since both
parties were asking for a per-listen fee, naturally that's what the
panel ended up recommendation- one midway between the figures suggested
by DiMA & the RIAA.

This might be fair if it were being applied to large webcasting
corporations whose stations were loaded down with lots of expensive ads.
But, given the state of webcasting today, the highest fees would be owed
by stations like ours that are in no position to pay them. We would be
required to cease operation - depriving our listeners of a source of
great enjoyment, depriving station operators of the opportunity to grow
our stations into profitability, and depriving the artists of the
potential revenue that would flow from our success.

The loss of our stations would serve the interests of no one. Due to the
nature of the proceeding, we are not allowed to file comments with the
arbitration panel. Therefore we are appealing directly to the public,
through the press. We invite anyone not familiar with the stations in
question to go to the station directory at www.shoutcast.com and sample
the programming from stations like Digitally Imported, Radio Paradise,
WOLF-FM, Groove Salad, Mostly Classical, KPIG, Smoothjazz.com, and
thousands of others. Nearly all of these stations would be forced to
cease operation if this ruling is adopted. All of the station operators
are hoping that a way can be found for reason and fairness to prevail.

Press Contacts:

Bill Goldsmith (RadioParadise, KPIG) - bill at radioparadise.com
Ari Shohat (Digitally Imported, Mostly Classical) -
ari at digitallyimported.com
(more to follow)

For further details on the proposal and its potential consequences, see
the webcast industry newsletter RAIN - at www.kurthanson.com. Scroll
back through the past two weeks' issues (on the masthead).