Canadian Media Companies Target CBC's Free Music Site 215
silentbrad writes, with bits and pieces from the Globe and Mail: "A number of Canadian media companies have joined forces to try to shut down a free music website recently launched by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., claiming it threatens to ruin the music business for all of them. The group, which includes Quebecor Inc., Stingray Digital, Cogeco Cable Inc., the Jim Pattison Group and Golden West Radio, believes that CBCmusic.ca will siphon away listeners from their own services, including private radio stations and competing websites that sell streaming music for a fee. The coalition is expected to expand soon to include Rogers Communications Inc. and Corus Entertainment Inc., two of the largest owners of radio stations in Canada. It intends to file a formal complaint with the CRTC, arguing that the broadcaster has no right under its mandate to compete with the private broadcasters in the online music space. ... 'The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing,' said Stingray CEO Eric Boyko, whose company runs the Galaxie music app that charges users $4.99 a month for unlimited listening. 'There is a cost to everything, yet CBC does not seem to think that is true.' ... The companies argue they must charge customers to offset royalty costs which are triggered every time a song is played, while the CBC gets around the pay-per-click problem because it is considered a non-profit corporation. ... Media executives aren't the only ones who have expressed concern. When the CBC service was launched in February, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers said that when it set a flat fees for the more than 100,000 music publishers it represents, it never envisioned a constant stream of free music flooding the Internet."
Why not just embrace it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Crybabies and whingers (Score:5, Interesting)
To be strictly fair, it's not exactly a level playing-field. The CBC is a crown corporation, and is directly supported in part by taxpayer dollars. The current government isn't terribly friendly to the CBC these days, and would sell off or axe the whole thing if they thought the electorate wouldn't revolt, but still. Not exactly a textbook case for free market competition.
Having said that, the CBC has paid it's licensing fees for the content, like any other corp, and is selling advertising to pay for the service, and is fulfilling its mandate of exposing Canadian and international listeners to Canadian artists, so I'm all for it.
Going for broke. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps this is false nostalgia - but even from reading history with the gilded age and robber barons, I don't seem to remember a time when industries were so, well, unafraid of being called on their bullshit.
I mean - yeah, the meat industry has had bouts of defending deadly safety conditions leading to not infrequent outbreaks and deaths, and the tobacco industry flexed historic levels of political and legal muscle lying about their products and covering up science they knew to be true for decades - but they really did seem to at least fear being caught in a direct lie.
It just doesn't seem that the music industry even cares about what they're saying - they just mix accusation, whole new concepts of honorable ownership they just made up a sentence ago, and blatant grabs for control as if it were a newly uncovered biblical virtue, and they the new prophet.
The rhetoric borders on empire, or isolated dictatorship in terms of brazen doublethink-style selective "morality" that just amounts to everything belonging to them, under all circumstances.
There's opportunistic jerks in all groups - it's kind of an intrinsic part of everything from game theory to classic social power studies in psychology - it's a basic part of how we explore and interact with eachother.
It's just crazy that in so many nations, so much of the population ends up standing aside, so these particular jerks can be such horrible bastards on such a constant basis, and they're still allowed to buy themselves such a voice in and over our lives - right to the heart of the houses of power.
They're a small parasitic part of the music industry - not a very big industry in the first place. Most other industries dwarf them. Why are they allowed to keep ramping things up seemingly without limit? At what point does this Napoleon meet his Waterloo?
Ryan Fenton
Re:Just protecting their assets (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh BS. These asshole have no problem when it's CBC radio broadcasting jazz or Classical, which it's been doing longer than any of the guys have been around. If they had a problem why didn't they go after CBC 20 years ago?
Re:CBC are munchkining (Score:5, Interesting)
These are all pretty obscure acts that the for-profit guys won't touch, so what exactly is the problem? And if it does give some of these acts greater exposure why are you upset? If the big media companies wouldn't touch these acts, then they've lost nothing.
Unless they're scares the A&R guys are now as pointless as testicles on a hen, and talent is being ignored in favor of the talentless dreck they foist on everyone.