NPR Takes First Step To Fight Internet Royalties 135
jmcharry sent in an article that opens, "After the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decided to drastically increase the royalties paid to musicians and record labels for streaming songs online, National Public Radio (NPR) will begin fighting the decision on Friday, March 16 by filing a petition for reconsideration with the CRB panel."
Re:Higher prices (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NPR going down the crapper (Score:3, Informative)
NPR is very much to the left. Don't get mad at "Morning Edition" for covering the White House just because it happens to have a Republican in it. When the president farts, it's still news.
Re:Why do public radio stations have to pay at all (Score:2, Informative)
The CRB specifically noted that they don't care what your revenues are -- all they cared about was making sure that the recording artists got "fairly" compensated for the use of their songs. That's why they shifted away from the revenue-based payment model to the performance-based one.
I disagree; there is no reason to exempt a certain class of stations from paying for their music. Either you make everyone pay, or (even better) you give everyone an exemption.
Save Our Internet Radio!!! (Score:2, Informative)
this law doesn't just affect over the air radio stations, but all streaming web casts. this is a bad deal, and it is supposed to be applied retro actively to 2006 (which will basically put all streaming radio stations out of business).
you can write your congressman or representative here [congress.org].
for more info on how this will affect streaming radio, check out www.SaveOurInternetRadio.com [saveourinternetradio.com]. i found out about this through soma fm's news section [somafm.com] (soma fm is an internet radio station i listen to, i am not affiliated with them)
Re:Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it? (Score:4, Informative)
Why I no longer support NPR
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/NPR.html [std.com]
There's Public, and then there's Public (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, NPR doesn't get much public money [npr.org]:
As for the stations themselves:
National Public Radio is public in the sense of being a public service, not in the sense of being primarily funded by tax dollars.
Re:Is that math correct? (Score:4, Informative)
10,000 listeners * $0.0008 * 15 songs/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year= $1,051,200.00 a year
Re:Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that we do not have room for LPFM stations is that the FCC over-licensed the commercial bandwidth, and did not leave enough in reserve for station that verifiably serve a public purpose. The commercial stations then managed to frame the argument so that the public would complain not about the over-licensing of redundant commercial interests, but about the public stations enacting a protectionist stand. The public stations have to be protectionist. No one is threatening to remove a commercial license, and most commercial stations can afford to increase their power. In fact, by putting forth such a arguments one is effect lobbying for the pure commercialization of the airwaves, leaving no room for public radio, much less LPFM.
The issue is greater than LPFM, greater than NPR, greater than Pacifca, greater than the ACN or whatever your favorite Christian network is. Such stations have limited funds and loads of enemies. On a crowded dial, it would be all too easy to create a network of LPFM transmitters that would block the signals of such public stations. Again, I am not saying that NPR is correct in it's actions. I am not generating a scary scenario so to use fear to move people to my position. All I am saying is that the dial is crowded. In some places, there is a scant half megahertz between stations. In some markets a single entity owns much of the commercial licenses. In some markets, the exact same single is broadcast over multiple commercial stations. There is enough bandwidth available for public, commercial, semi-commercial, and LPFM. The problem is that FCC does not take the public airwaves seriously, and allows the private corporations to do whatever they like. Then the private corporations have enough media access so that people believe that it is the public radio fault.
Another RIAA Ripoff (Score:3, Informative)
The new streaming royalty rates don't increase the royalties paid to musicians and record labels, they just increase the royalties collected from streamers. The RIAA (ie SoundScan, and predecessors/competitors BMI & ASCAP) have never paid all of the collected royalties to its rightful owners. Instead, the collection agencies keep it for themselves. I hope you're not surprised.
So it's excellent news that NPR is fighting this move. I hope NPR's entry also encourages other well-positioned orgs to complain. These new rates completely eliminate hobbyist and personal streaming to friends, by keeping the $500 per year minimum fee that is now equal to the per-play fee for supporting many dozens of simultaneous listeners. That minimum should be totally discarded, even more important than lowering the arbitrarily high (but still somewhat affordable, until it rises again over the next couple/few years) per-play rates that also squeeze out noncommercial and small commercial webcasters.
No she's not (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Where are these numbers coming from? (Score:2, Informative)
Sure, you're failing to take in to account 3 things:
1) The costs are per listener. That's $170/year/listener, now figure they have over 10k listeners...
2) These stations don't currently run commercials, largely because they pay so little. Their calculations are done without running commercials(16 songs/hour), and the calculations with commercials come up with revenue being woefully short.
3) This isn't factoring in other costs. Employees, bandwidth, etc.