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I don't know about anyone else but I HAVE been in touch with my congress representatives and even those outside of my own district, to let them know that what the RIAA is trying to get through the US Copyright Royalty Board is blatantly unfair to online radio stations and should be stopped.
Here is news release (dated April 30,2007) just a few hours ago regarding this matter. The US Congress is seeking to overturn the royalty ruling handed down back in April by the US Copyright Royalty Board; finally someone has heard our cries and has decided to do something about the internet radio community being raped and pillaged. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) must answer to congress in addition to two member of the House ofRepresentatives which have proposed a new law which could wipe out the recent ruling by the CRB and would propose a different payment system.
Internet radio activists state that the CRB's ruling is unfair as online radio is penalized with the payment system proposed by the CRB. Right now regular broadcast radio is not charged any royalty fees and satellite pays much less than what has been proposed for internet radio to pay. This new bill was introduced by Democrat Jay Inslee and Republican Don Manzullo.
Jake Ward of SaveNetRadio is quoted as saying "Since the CRB's decision to dramatically and unfairly increase webcaster royalty rates, millions of internet radio listeners, webcasters and artists have called on Congress to take action. Today Congress took notice, and we thank Mr Inslee for leading the charge to save music diversity on the internet.".
The CRB has proposed that internet radio fees would be based on two things: an annual charge and a percentage of profits. The minimum fee would be $500 PER STATION with a fee scale of the following:
2006 $.0008 per performance
2007 $.0011 per performance
2008 $.0014 per performance
2009 $.0018 per performance
2010 $.0019 per performance
A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 "performances" for each song it plays. These charges are set to be billed reto-actively so any station that opened any time in 2006 would owe all the back fees as well as current fees. For noncommercial webcasters, the fee will be $500 per channel, for up to 159,140 ATH (aggregate tuning hours) per month. They would pay the commercial rate for all transmissions above that number.
I think we can all see how easily this would crush any small online radio station and I am very happy to see that our Congress is actually listening to the people for once on this issue. The thing about all of this is that the artists aren't even making the money off of any of this! 90% of what is collected by SoundExchange (AKA the henchmen of the RIAA!) goes to them and the remaining 10% actually goes to the artists. How are these organizations protecting the artists interests? This is nothing but a SHAM and a SCAM that our US government has been sucked in to and now it's time that the government start listening to the people that actually use the internet and know what the hell internet radio is all about.
If you PAID for a song,CD, record or tape then you should OWN it, not be renting it and pay more down the road if you want to play it somewhere. It's bullshit that these people are making money hand over fist and leaving DJ's hanging in the wind. Where would these artists be if it weren't for DJ's playing their damn music in the first place?
Don't these people realize that most artists are as popular as they are because some DJ somewhere is playing their music? It's bullshit too that plain old radio doesn't have to pay ANYTHING in royalties and they are the biggest conglomerates of music in the world! How in the hell did that happen? Why aren't they being raked over the fiery coals along with the rest of us? Don't these organizations know that the true money lies there with their advertising dollars and their big corporate sponsors????
Coming after the little people isn't where they will see the big money but I think they know they would flat out LOSE if they tried to take on plain old radio. I know for a fact that Clear Channels (one of the biggest radio corporations in the US) owns in the neighborhood of 7 radio stations here in Arizona. Now, imagine how much these thugs would be getting if they charged Clear Channels for EVERY SONG that EVERY STATION they owned played! They actually own more than 1200 radio stations across the US so lets just say for the sake of argument that have 1200 stations. Each station has it's own music and lets say each song is five minutes long, that gives us 12 songs per hour per station so that's a total of 14,400 PER HOUR that they play.
Now, let's multiply that with 24 hours in a day and you get 354,600 songs played in just ONE DAY. So looking at the fee scale that was presented by the Copyright Royalty Board, they could charge per song per kilowatt to roughly gage how many listeners the stations may have at any given time. But even if Clear Channels was just charged for one performance, you are talking about a LOT of money just in one day right?
The total is going to make you shit yourself.....$2,534,800 PER DAY people, per day! You can't tell me that DJ's playing music on the internet is going to get these robbers even CLOSE to that in a month! Raping internet radio is nothing compared to what they COULD be getting from established, sponsored plain old radio stations. They know they would lose though so with that in mind they decided to burn us like ants under a magnifying glass; they are bullies and we all know bullies prey on the WEAK and the SMALL.
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DJ Digital Gem
(formerly DJGemini69)
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