NPR Takes First Step To Fight Internet Royalties

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."

Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it?

[isaac]

Funny NPR should be speaking up for the little guy now. They were the ones who in 2000 put the nails in the coffin of low-power community FM broadcasting by joining forces with the NAB to lobby Congress. (References a gogo [google.com]).

NPR's only interested now that commercial radio is about to shut down their streaming operations (which are far more popular than commercial simulcast streams). Pardon me if I fail to shed a tear for NPR this time around, even if I also reject the CRB's new webcasting royalty rates.

NPR, you'll never see a fucking dime from me until you stand up for real community radio and reverse your stand on LPFM. I used to be a regular contributor to local public radio stations before your shameless whoring in 2000.

-Isaac

I for one am glad

[zappepcs]

that someone with public interest is starting to yell. I listen to Internet radio only these days. I'm not wanting the RIAA to send me letters of any kind, and standard radio SUCKS thanks to corporate radio. I support the stations that I listen to because the play the music I like, music that I cannot hear on broadcast radio. Now, the RIAA wants to put the only source of music that is worth listening to out of business??? WTF! Broadcast radio will end up being ALL talk radio.

I hope that this brings the whole thing to public attention in a way that is bad for the RIAA in general. This stranglehold that they have on music distribution will end up killing the music business as we have known it. Perhaps that is a good thing, I don't know, but I can say that from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to see the RIAA legally squeezed for monopolistic practices somehow. Yes, I know its not likely, but they do need slapped down hard.

Re:I actually read the ruling...

[Plekto]

The sad thing is that this oney-grab by the recording industry will do noting except move all of th internet radio stations ofshore. All of the potintial sales and possible deals, plus the money they currently pay - poof - gone.

Talk about myopic. I can see a board meeting a few months ago:
"Hey I have an idea! Let's raise the fees for internet streaming to a level that forces them all to go out of business or move offshore!" Somebody needs to be fired for this nonsense, since they way that you stimulate any business like this is by making it easier and less painful to comply/utilize it.

Re:This could really hurt NPR

[siglercm]

I've only donated to public radio for vanity promotional statements since they received the $200 million Kroc bequest [npr.org] to their endowment fund. I'm not a finance expert, but at some point their costs should be completely covered by their endowment annuities. So many charities are in much greater need.

Re:Why do public radio stations have to pay at all

[enjahova]

NPR is paying for songs. The government gives money to NPR to pay for the songs. So your next logical step is for the government to decide it doesn't want to pay anymore and just take the songs for free? As much as I'd like that in the case of RIAA, I don't think it will go over that well.

Maybe one day when we get over all this IP crap.

Re:NPR going down the crapper

[MightyYar]

They do really, really try to be balanced. But their underlying beliefs poke through. Terry Gross is a good example - she's only a really good, hard-hitting interviewer when her guest is someone that she has an ideological disagreement with. She's not very good when someone like Al Franken comes on - it just turns into a love-fest.

I still prefer NPR to most of the alternative, and really only stray from it when they have the beg-a-thon going on, or when they are doing a 20-minute piece on a harmonica player from Bangladesh.

Re:NPR going down the crapper

[linguizic]

You have no clue how bad NPR can get. I live Mississippi where anything with the prefix "public" gets accused of being a part of a leftist conspiracy. The funding here for NPR is SO bad (how bad is it?) they once had a drive time that lasted a month and a half! I would LOVE for the NPR stations here to switch to an all talk format, it sure beats the hell out of the crappy public domain classical that they play here. This is incredibly sad since it was Mississippi Public Broadcasting(MPB) that aired non-stop vital information when Katrina hit--even when their own headquarters was being hit! American Family Radio didn't even do that and they're based way in the north of the state that got a little wind for Katrina. I've talked face-to-face with the director of MPB as she is my neighbor, and she is not an idiot. She's a very capable and dedicated person, but Mississippians are clueless.

Re:NPR going down the crapper

[dbIII]

Since I'm in Australia I only get "All things considered" from NPR as a rebroadcast and I find it often good if somewhat slow paced and sentimental. What other programs do they have which can be recommended while they are still online?

As for it being left, just about every international news source outside of the USA looks that way in comparison to CNN et al - I still can't forgive them using file film of Palestinians celebrating a soccer win on the night of Sept 11 and pretending it was film of them celebrating the mass murder - lazy journalism and incitement to riot thrown together.

Re:I for one am glad

[phaggood]

> How would you suggest that musicians who record music get paid?

According to this [senate.gov] artist's Senate testimony from 2002, by selling t-shirts.

Therefore, most artists go into debt to make albums. In twelve years of making records, I have never recouped or received a royalty check, even though many of my records have gone into profit. I discovered early on that there's little money to be made from recording albums, and I learned to place my musical aspirations alongside more practical realities in order to supplement my income. No matter what royalty arrangement I made with a record label or even when I produced my own recordings, I never made a livable income from my recording projects alone. So I wrote songs for other artists, toured extensively, sang as a background singer and instrumentalist for other artists, and marketed merchandise. How ironic that, after years of developing my skills and honing my creativity, I generate greater profits selling T-shirts.

Re:Oops, posted to soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this was supposed to be fixed with S 2686 [freepress.net] which was a huge megabill including provisions for net neutrality and opening up the spectrum for community internet. It also had some nasty DRM provisions. Thankfully it died near the end of last Congress but it will come up again. There's just too much going on in the telecommunications area for them to ignore. Watch for it. It might even be bigger than DMCA.

Re:Why do public radio stations have to pay at all

[ScentCone]

They're funded with public money already, so the payments for these royalties are going straight from our tax dollars to the music labels

Do you ever actually listen to "public" radio? A few hours of listening during drive time here in the DC area will have you hearing commercials from large associations, corporations, and other underwriting entities (as well as vanity donors) that want the exposure. If public radio's use of licensed material is a part of what brings the audience that those advertisers want to reach, then paying what the producers of that material ask is just a cost of attracting those big-ticket ads and donations.

Anyone who thinks that just because such stations are non-profits that they don't want all the audience and ad revenue they can get is completely misunderstanding the nature of the beast. They have payrolls to meet, and they have to compete to hire the people they want to hire. Just like any other business, they have facilities to pay for, web sites to run, etc... and they want cash. They attract a lot of their cash through advertising, and they price the advertising according to the audience they can deliver to the advertisers. If that means they broadcast, or stream from their web sites, stuff that costs them money in order to then sell that audience to advertisers, then so be it. Gotta spend it to make it.

Re:This could really hurt NPR

[Seumas]

I'd love to listen to NPR more often, but it really just makes me want to take a nap. Too much new-age crap. And, really, I feel about the same listening to NPR as I feel when I'm forced to watch Bill O'Reilly. Perhaps not quite that bad. But they do replay the same content countless times until you've nearly memorized every word. And as worldly as I would like to be, I really don't care about organic wall-paper makers in a remote Irish village that are saving their money to refurbish the town well. Or, on the flip side, twenty-five minute audio interviews with some British guy that dresses like Captain Picard and built his house to look like the Enterprise from Next Generation.

I know a lot of people claim to listen to NPR, but I think the number that claim to far outweighs the number who actually do. The only time I've actually heard someone listening to it was in the occasional taxi cab.

On the other hand public radio broadcasting is far superior to public television broadcasting. I haven't watched PBS in a very long time, but all they ever had were pledge drives, documentaries about lesbians who swear a lot, hunting shows and round tables of women talking about current events. Oh, and of course all of the outdated BBC content that was three decades old (except for good stuff like Doctor Who, which they stopped broadcasting).

Really, I think public broadcasting in all manner has outlived its purpose. Especially with the internet. Hell, I can get the BBC content directly. Why do I need to get it filtered through a poorly-structured PBS broadcast at additional expense?

The only truly great thing I can say about NPR is that they present their content without the brain-numbing, stupifying, insultingly ADHD-oriented flash-bang, shock-and-awe presentation of other news outlets.

Where are these numbers coming from?

[RingDev]

FTFA: "The suggested new rates would increase to $.0008 per-play for 2006 (retroactively), $.0011 for 2007, $.0014 in 2008, $.0018 in 2009 and $.0019 for 2010"

Okay, so if we figure each time you play a song you owe $0.002 (rounding up for easy numbers), and on average you play 10 songs an hour (average 4 minutes each with 20 minutes for commercials/station ID), you're paying $0.02/hour. Over the entire day (and night) $0.48. Over an entire year $170.88... So how do they get from $170.88 to $120,000 (or the millions that some stations are claiming)?

I'm not saying anyone is lying about the cost, I just don't see how the costs are being calculated, anyone care to explain?

-Rick