Reavantos's Journal: RIAA kills internet radio

I am A internet radio DJ for DNDRadio.com (ddo.mmoradio.com) and i want to bring to your attention that the RIAA is at it again. this time, they are killing internet radio! "direct qoute from our website" The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has announced its decision on Internet Radio royalty rates, rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters (an MMORadio) and instead adopting the "per play" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange (a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA). All internet radio stations have to pay something called "royalties" to organizations like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and SoundExchange for the music they play to operate legally in the United States. Previously, you've paid a montly or yearly fee plus a percentage of revenue generated from the station by the ways of on-air advertsiments, web banners, etc.. Now 90% of online radio stations don't make any money and what little they do goes right back into paying the bills for bandwidth, hosting cost, royalty fees, etc. So for the couple of hundred dollars you make, that helps to pay the $5,000 dollar bill per month in operating a station. Now we've all had to pay the devil his due for broadcasting on the internet (while other FM stations and conglomerates like Clear Channel pay nothing). But the devil is asking for more than just your soul. He's wanting the soul's of everyone. Under this new rate, effective retroactively through the beginning of 2006 (meaning starting not this year, but last year), broadcasters are required to pay the following per song per listener. 2006 $.0008 per performance 2007 $.0011 per performance 2008 $.0014 per performance 2009 $.0018 per performance 2010 $.0019 per performance A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener. So if we have 500 people listening we have just done 500 "performances" for each song that we play. For example, let's say that we have 500 listeners listening to MMORadio. Now in an hour, you play around 16 songs per hour. There are 24 hours in a day and 31 days in a month (16 * 24 * 31). That's 11,904 song played. Now multiply that by 500 listener average. That's 5,952,000 performances. Now, multiply that 5,952,000 by $.0008 per performance. That comes out to $4,761.60 per month. Now take that $4,761.60 and multiply that by 12 months a year and your totaly royalties paid per year is $57,139.20. Freaked out yet, just wait. We also operate other radio stations, so take that number and add it to their royalties and we now have to pay over $130,000 per year in fees. To just SoundExchange. This is not including fee's that we pay to other people like SESAC, BMI, and ASCAP. Plus our hosting cost for the websites (around $300 per month), bandwidth cost for streaming (around $10,000), and other fee's associated with the stations operations. At the end of the year, under this new structure, TMSBroadcasting cost around $300,000 dollars per year to operate. Now we are a small station compaired to other companies. Look at people like AOL Radio Network. Doing the same math calculations for their royalites to SoundExchange for the month of November 2006, they are estimated to pay around $1.65 million just for the month of November. Other startup stations created with Venture Capital that have to meet the new royalty obligation might exceed the total proceeds of the recent rounds of venture capital plus all the sales revenues that they have been able to generate. Medium size webcaster Bill Goldsmith has said, "Our obligation under this rate structure would be equal to over 125% of our total income. Now the RIAA can, at any time, agree to strike a deal with independent webcaster to allow us to pay a more realistic royalty, one based on a percentage of our income." This issue isn't over and I'm sure that your going to hear a ton more about it. But in the mean time, let people know about this. Digg articles like this one or Slashdot it. Write magazines, newspapers, blog it, contact members of Congress and tell them of the problems with this new structure. Let everyone know how much it would suck we all loss our favoriate Internet radio stations, especially this one, because they we're forced offline because of Licencing cost. Discuss this Article Here: http://forums.mmoradio.com/showthread.php?t=2303 http://lineage2.mmoradio.com/global/New_Royalty_Rates_For_Internet_Radio_Say_Good-Bye_to_Every_Station.php