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INTERNET RADIO WILL DIE, HELP SAVE IT!
INTERNET RADIO WILL DIE IF YOU DO NOT HELP IT!
The Copyright Royalty Board has inacted new license fee's for streaming radio stations in the United States that will affectivly shut down most, if not all independent and small scale streaming operations!
From Soma.fm
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The Copyright Royalty Board has announced new copyright licensing fees for internet radio stations. The new fees are a staggering increase over our previous annual royalty rate of about $22,000 to over $600,000 for 2006. And the fees are even higher in 2007, based on our current listenership, they'll be over $1 million dollars for 2007! (Which is 3-4 times what we hope to raise in 2007). If you think this is unfair to internet radio, and you are an American citizen, you can send a letter to your congressman showing your support for internet radio. We already have the attention of Congress, so now you have to let them know you support internet radio and that royalty rates shouldn't be structured in a way that will put small webcasters out of business. |
From Digitally Imported
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On Friday March 2nd, the U.S. government, through the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), made a determination of the royalty rates Internet Radio webcasters must pay the owners of sound recording copyrights to license the music they webcast for the years 2006-2010. The license is paid to SoundExchange, a nonprofit organization that collects royalty payments from digital music broadcasters and distributes them to rights holders.
The issue is that the new rates completely ignore the business and market realities of Internet Radio. In a nutshell they expect many webcasters, such as at Digitally Imported, to pay far greater money for licensing than we ever even collect from all of our services, effectively driving webcasters out of business.
For commercial and for larger non-commercial webcasters the judges set a pay-per-play rate of:
$.0008 per play for 2006
$.0011 per play for 2007
$.0014 per play for 2008
$.0018 per play for 2009
$.0019 per play for 2010
No need to adjust your glasses, you are seeing it correctly. Not only are the rates outrageous but they also continue to increase wildly every year. For example, by 2007 the rate jumps 37% from 2006!
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This will not only affect small webcasters, but will affect even the largest of streaming radio stations. That means National Public Radio streams and most any radio station that also streams its normal over the air radio content.
The Boston Globe has a good article here about how it will affect so many people.
Please if you are in the United States contact your member of congress now!
Please DO NOT let stations like Soma.fm get shut down. These are the only bastions around to hear music you can't really get anyplace else!
If Tony, Greg, Jason or Swamper could sticky this, it would be a great help!
If people could also post this up in their locals and the COR and DJ Booth/Promotion (if its not already) that would be cool. I don't want to look like a spammer.
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INTERNET RADIO WILL DIE IF YOU DO NOT HELP!
IF YOU ARE IN THE UNITED STATES CLICK HERE!
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