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Sounds Greedy
Web radio's last stand
A new ruling involving the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is set to wipe out independent online music stations.
A new ruling under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to change the playlist at SomaFM and other stations like it, if not actually shut them down altogether.
The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, a body appointed by the U.S. Copyright Office, ruled on Feb. 20 that under the DMCA, radio stations must pay a fraction of a cent per song, per listener, for every song they stream. Under the CARP ruling, Internet-only radio stations would pay a royalty fee of 14/100 of a cent per song, per listener, retroactively through October 1998. Webcasters are up in arms -- while they are not opposed to the principle of royalty fees, they say the rate structure is far out of balance to the economics of these tiny, often one-person operations.
Congress didn't really think about how streaming audio broadcasts are using compressed audio and that they do not sound as good as the original CD. Streaming is not a way of actually distributing recorded music. And that's what the RIAA and the other copyright owners were concerned about when they were pushing for the passage of the DMCA. They were all scared that people would be able to distribute perfect copies of their sound recordings.
The key phrase there is "perfect copies." [The DMCA] talks about how digital allows "perfect copies" of an original. And therefore they had to be taxed or there had to be a royalty at a very high price, because these perfect copies would be taking away from record company sales.
But the truth is that with Internet radio, while the sound quality is good, in most cases, it's not as good as the FM broadcast. And in some cases when it is as good as an FM broadcast, we all know that an FM radio doesn't sound nearly as good as listening to the original CD.

posted by Jerry permanent link