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Warner To End Free Streaming of Its Content 278

Posted by kdawson from the moment-of-silence-in-the-stream dept.
eldavojohn writes "If you have a license to stream content for free from Warner, be aware: Warner has announced plans to cancel streaming licenses. Major sites such as Last.fm, Spotify, and Pandora may be affected — Warner has not yet spelled out whether streaming restrictions will apply to existing licenses, or only to future ones. Warner's CEO Edgar Bronfman said, 'Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.' You might contend that Warner gets a cut of the ad-based revenue these free streaming sites take in. While true, Bronfman contended that this revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work. The article quotes spokesmen for other labels who disagree with Warner's stance, however. Music's digital birthing pains continue."
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Warner To End Free Streaming of Its Content More

Warner To End Free Streaming of Its Content

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  • Arguing with the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12, 2010 @09:58AM (#31112278)

    >revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work

    Then they won't get anything.


    • "revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work"

      Then they won't get anything.

      I still buy a lot of CDs in the bargain bin at Half-Price Books. I wonder how much compensation they think are they getting every time I listen to my LEGALLY PURCHASED $1 or $2 CD that I bought third-hand?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lumpy ( 12016 )

        I'm more sinister than you. I buy my CD's USED... Yup it's the same as slapping food out of the executives children, and sucker punching their mothers.

        Buy them used, it pisses off the music industry more than piracy does.

    • Re:Arguing with the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rennt ( 582550 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:31AM (#31112642)

      Exactly. The value of your product is whatever the market decides it is worth. Turns out that for streams of bits this value is "not much".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tixxit ( 1107127 )
        I live in Canada, so I actually pay for last.fm. I think $3/m is still a great deal, considering how much I listen to it. However, I wonder if last.fm would have statistics on how many customers they lost by charging and whether it was worth it or not.

        • I live in Canada, so I actually pay for last.fm. I think $3/m is still a great deal, considering how much I listen to it. However, I wonder if last.fm would have statistics on how many customers they lost by charging and whether it was worth it or not.

          I subscribed at US$3/month to last.fm and it's probably the best value I get out that three dollars. On the other hand, its the thin end of the wedge as far as the finances go - I've heard artists and music I would never have discovered otherwise. Bad news for the big media companies though - I try and buy CDs direct from the band or as close as I can get. No point paying $30 on amazon.ca when I can order it direct from the artist for $15 including shipping.

          One last point - I have become very sensitive to

      • Re:Arguing with the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ElectricTurtle ( 1171201 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @11:01AM (#31113044)
        "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." - Publius Syrius

        Definitely one of my favorite quotes from Civ IV ;-p

      • If they think losing money to free internet streams is bad, just wait until he hears about this new technology [wikipedia.org]. The music industry doesn't stand a chance.

  • Do they hope legal purchases will fill the void? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:02AM (#31112324) Homepage Journal

    ...because I'm pretty sure this will only boost piracy...

    • EMI (Score:4, Informative)

      by Xest ( 935314 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:23AM (#31112524)

      Maybe they're trying to imitate EMI's recent success.

      For those who don't know, EMI, who own the likes of the Beetles records and so forth recently just announced a £1.5 billion loss over the last financial year. They currently look like they could very well be heading to bankruptcy.

      At least if they do end up that way, that's what, 1 down, 3 to go?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flitty ( 981864 )
      What I think is probably going to happen is every Warner label artist, other than "Major" established bands (and possibly cultural phenomenons/one hit wonders) will never get off the ground.

      I'm not a big torrent guy, and my wife only watches what is either on Hulu or gets caught by our DVR. Unless there are rave reviews for some show on cable, we don't see it, and don't care to take the time to find it. Music has become very similiar in its form of transmission. If I hear about a band directly from a f

  • Just a question, and thought.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rotide ( 1015173 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:07AM (#31112360)

    Say I had a bunch of bits on my server. Say those bits were recorded from people with talent and "permanently" placed on my server. I also have the right to sell those bits to whomever wants them.

    The best part here, if you want to buy my bits, I send you a duplicate copy at next to no cost to me. Now you sell those bits or make money in/directly from them, I get a cut.

    Now say a site out there wants to stream my bits to non-paying customers, but, I could see _some_ revenue from advertisements your site runs. How is this a bad thing for me as the bit holder? How is this hurting me?

    Sure, I could let others stream my bits and get more money from them as they might have higher profit yielding business models. But in the end, site y streaming my music with advertisements isn't really going to hurt my profit from site x that charges an up-front fee (radio is unreliable if you want to hear x and y songs).

    I guess my open question, to the recording industry is, if you can stream your bits to everyone and expect _some_ compensation from each, why wouldn't you want _everyone_ to start offering your products at whatever profit they can gleam for you?

    If you're worried about piracy, well, that boat sailed a long time ago.

    Profit is profit. You're not making a physical object that costs you x dollars. You're allowing others access to your bits that cost you next to nothing to duplicate (although, I know it costs _something_, it will be a lot less than physical items).

    Obviously, that was rhetorical as the Recording Industry will never respond to me. But my own conclusion comes out as simple control, or at least their own illusion of control.

    *Paying* Pandora Member/Customer

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by characterZer0 ( 138196 )

      You get an n% cut from reseller A.

      You add reseller B, and you get an (n/2)% cut.

      Customers move from reseller A to reseller B.

      Your revenue drops.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rotide ( 1015173 )

        And if reseller A was too expensive and I would never sign up with them but reseller B was in my price range? That's profit gained, not lost.

        If the only source you allow to sell your items is out of a large enough percentage of the populations price range, you're not going to sell that much. But if you allow the price to drop, you can gain more customers and potentially more profit.

        Why sell one item at a million dollars when you can sell 10 million of the same item for two dollars? Especially when that i

        • That's the whole point: "if" and "potentially". Yes, it's conceivable that allowing B to operate will not impact the sales of A, or that the loss of revenue from A will be made up for by revenue from B. However you don't know if that's the case, you just want it to be true, and you arbitrarily picked numbers so they come out in favor of the conclusion you wish for. Realistically you need to estimate:
          • PA = profit from selling one item via distributor A
          • LCA = loss of customers from distributor A if we allow

      • On the other hand. If reseller B's volume is three times reseller A's. Then your revenue goes up.

        And more than likely the only way reseller B is going to get the deal that allows B's cut to the publisher to be (n/2)%. Would be to convince them that they can deliver enough volume to more than make up the smaller per song/album share.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alen ( 225700 )

      duplicating the bits might not cost very much, but creating them does. studio time, producer fees, etc aren't cheap. i work near a music studio and pass it by on the way home. once in a while i see musicians hanging out. one time I think i saw the Foo Fighters going in and out, but i wasn't a big fan back then and didn't recognize them. another time a few session guitarists walked out and headed toward the subway walking in front of me. and they talked about how some guy they know tried out for The Smashing

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jfengel ( 409917 )

        The creation costs are there, but relatively trivial. And much, much lower than it was a few years ago.

        The real expense is in drumming up interest in your bits, rather than somebody else's. The drop in the cost of creating the bits means that everybody's got them. Some are good, most are bad, but getting yours to stand out is incredibly hard.

        Despite what music fans like to think, they don't instantly glom on to things that they like. Yes, I'm sure YOU do, Mr. Music Fan. But if you've ever tried to mark

      • Maybe they should hire cheaper producers and engineers.

        Or here's a novel idea: Just put an artist in a room, with mic, and record direct to the hard drive. It doesn't get any cheaper than that, and it's how it used to be done back in the 1960s and earlier.

    • I'm also a paying Pandora member, and this decision just means that I won't be hearing Warner music.

      Oh well.

    • The big media companies are still thinking in 20th century terms of creating scarcity and profiting from standing between people and what they think they want. The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as you gave an example of. The irony goes for media publishers, who want to be compensated every time someone enjoys themselves and prevent others from being happy, rather than everyone just help each other be happy

  • I use Spotify a lot. But there's one huge problem: If Big Content pulls out then Spotify will wither and die. And if they do then my playlists, which contain the most valuable information for me, are also doomed. This is huge problem.

    If I spend countless hours listening to music and discovering new artists without the ability to export my playlists in some open format (just the metadata, not the songs themselves), I'd get totally pissed if I can't access them any more. So as long as Big Content is threatening to pull out of these services (which apparently still pay more than radio from what I've heard) I'm not inclined to pay. I can always get the tracks themselves through some other service, but only if I know which they are.

    I wish they would just friggin stop shooting themselves in the foot, and stop treating customers like the enemy. But I'm too idealistic, I guess...

  • I smiled today, I must owe somebody money. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GTarrant ( 726871 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:10AM (#31112406)
    I like this line..."Bronfman contended that this revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work" - it's a complete summary of the way the labels are thinking. Each time you do something - anything - that resembles enjoyment, their feeling is that somebody - somewhere - should be getting money from you. If you're thinking about a song but it isn't being played, in his mind, you owe for those few seconds. Consider that this is an industry that sells you a ringtone, then says you owe extra money when your phone rings because you just broadcast music in public. Stunning.

    I guess the question is, what amount of money would he say is the right amount of "compensation" for each individual's enjoyment of each work? Because very few of these streaming services are making much money at all, and while I know executives in his industry have the feeling of "If we cut off access, people will pay us 100x more to listen to it! They'll be dying to listen to our music!" (how well did that work for online newspaper sites that decided to go behind a paywall?), the reality is, most people I know that enjoy listening to Pandora or last.fm would be perfectly fine if everything of Warner just dropped off it - they'd just continue listening to whatever it serves up on the various stations they've created and enjoy. They certainly wouldn't start paying big bucks to a Warner Music Station. The labels have tried that, they lose their shirt every time.

    • Re:I smiled today, I must owe somebody money. (Score:5, Funny)

      by clickety6 ( 141178 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:34AM (#31112690)

      There's quite a lot of music tracks these days that cause me discomfort when I hear them. As this is negative enjoyment, does that mean the music industry owes me money?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ms1234 ( 211056 )

      Will I be compensated if I do not enjoy music and still have to listen to it? I thought so.

    • That line reveals a lot about the character of this man. It's bad enough we live in a society where people feel entitled to money for their suffering, even if it was caused by a freak accident or their own carelessness. But this guy has a Pavlovian reaction to demanding money anytime someone feels any iota of enjoyment from his company's product. I had no idea arrogance could be taken to such an extreme height.

    • the reality is, most people I know that enjoy listening to Pandora or last.fm would be perfectly fine if everything of Warner just dropped off it - they'd just continue listening to whatever it serves up on the various stations they've created and enjoy.

      This seems like it should be of at least *some* concern to record labels. People use sites like Pandora to discover new music that they might like. Pull your music from it, and people won't discover your music. They'll discover other labels' music.

      They may as well be telling radio stations to stop playing their music, telling MTV to stop showing their videos. Does MTV show videos ever anymore? Is there a channel that does? I don't know. I don't listen to the radio either. If I find new music that I

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I like this line..."Bronfman contended that this revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work" - it's a complete summary of the way the labels are thinking. Each time you do something - anything - that resembles enjoyment, their feeling is that somebody - somewhere - should be getting money from you. (...) I know executives in his industry have the feeling of "If we cut off access, people will pay us 100x more to listen to it! They'll be dying to listen to our music!"

      Flip that statement around, and you're only willing to pay for something when you enjoy it. The more you enjoy it, the more you're willing but not inclined to pay for it. So if you offer it real cheap, many people will listen but because the ad revenue is so little you make less in total and you could make more by charging more. 10,000 fans willing to pay 0.65$ (+ 0.34 to Apple) at iTunes = 6500$ is still more than 10,000,000 times played at Spotify at 0.0002$/play = 2000$. Yes, the payouts have really been

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xacid ( 560407 )
      Glad someone wrote this for me. Saved me some ranting. It's that craptastic mentality that shoved the consumer into piracy in the first place. 20 dollars still for a friggin cd? Come on guys. And why does't music depreciate? What's up with that? No, you're paying for the *enjoyment* of that music.

    • >>>Consider that this is an industry that sells you a ringtone, then says you owe extra money when your phone rings because you just broadcast music in public. Stunning.
      >>>

      Saying it is okay.

      Bribing the politicians to give them the legal right to get paid for that "public performance", or else send you an extortionate letter for $5000, or drag you to court for a $100,000 fine......... that's the real problem.

      These corporations have stolen the People's Government and turned it into the Corpo

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Mandatory downtime for criticism (Score:3, Informative)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepplesNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:12AM (#31112420) Homepage Journal
    That's bad news for people who post criticism of the music of an artist on a Warner label [youtube.com]. Even though the fair use of a copyrighted work for criticism of that work or its author is permitted under United States law (17 USC 107), several venues for this criticism have a "remove first, ask questions later" policy that enforces a mandatory two-week downtime for any work that is the subject of a third-party copyright claim.

  • More greed (Score:4, Informative)

    by harmonise ( 1484057 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:16AM (#31112460)

    Didn't the laws for streaming compensation just change in the US because labels thought they weren't being paid enough? Now they want more money? Oh well, it's their loss. Streaming is the new broadcast radio. It's how people are discovering new music these days. If you don't have your music out on these sites then your artists will have less exposure. This is great news for the other artists (on other labels and independent) who will now have less competition on the streaming sites.

  • They just don't get it ey? People recognize music for what it is. Waves in the air. It has no value as such. Now they finally had a way to combat what is in some countries illegal downloading in a positive manner for both them and consumer and now they pull the plug. It aren't the downloaders who are killing the business, it's the business that is going for full suicide.

  • Unmitigated Greed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dog-Cow ( 21281 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:18AM (#31112478)

    The streaming services are doing all the work. They host the songs. They pay for the bandwidth they use. Warner is doing NOTHING except giving permission. After that, they pay nothing. They do NOTHING.

    Any money they get should be plenty, considering they do NOTHING for anyone. It's literally free money.

    This is pure greed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      The streaming services are doing all the work. They host the songs. They pay for the bandwidth they use.

      They don't write the songs, and they don't record the songs.

  • Maybe try treating customers better? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by headkase ( 533448 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @10:19AM (#31112480)
    I'm gonna vent here because this just happened and is directly to do with digital media. A certain store that deals in tunes I emailed last week. My niece had spent over $150 on those 99 cent or so tracks there, at my encouragement. I really do want to see her at least start out on a path of compensating the artists (even though the labels can suck it). So, anyway, she had a catastrophic hard drive crash - everything gone. Reinstalled Windows no problem, go back to this tunes program, no option to re-download legally purchased music. A bit of Internet searching led to people referencing a mythical "form" which when filled out would get the Internet gods to flip a switch and give you a magical one-time additional download. Bandwidth doesn't really cost that much, this is a customer service issue here: it's different from physical cd's. So filled out the form and the days go by and no response. I'm disheartened. What did we do last night? I installed Limewire on her machine and I'll be damned if she's going to throw her money away again. $150 may not be a drop to them but to my thirteen year old niece it was a fortune I talked her into spending when she could have chosen to get her music the way everyone else does from the beginning. We'll try again in a few more years and see if the industry has smartened up by then. I don't have the heart to talk her into potentially throwing her money away again before then.

    • Apple isn't too bad in that regard. I had some Futurama episodes that I lost when moving to a new computer, filled out the form and was able to redownload all them in about a week.

      • I hope I get to eat my words. It's been about 6 days with no response yet here.

        • Well, what I did was ask for a refund, they told me no. I then replied and asked to redownload and they granted it.

          Dear x,

          Your request for a refund for "Futurama, Season 1" was carefully considered; however, according to the iTunes Store Terms of Sale, all purchases made on the iTunes Store are ineligible for refund. This policy matches Apple's refund policies and provides protection for copyrighted materials

          Can I redownload it?

          Followup:

          Hi x,

          I'm sorry to hear that you purchase "Futurama, Season 1" is missi

          • Thank you for the tip! If I *still* haven't received a response in another 3-4 days that will be the next step: request a refund. I don't actually want a refund, I want my niece to have her music and *this* time I will darn well burn the cdr right away. Ironic that here the cdr also contains a tax to pay for pirated music when you burn your legal collection to it...

    • In my experience, Napster has been pretty good about letting me re-download tracks I lost due to an emergency reformat. Additionally, utilities exist for retrieving songs off an iPod if they were synced to one. I totally agree with the fact that the issue you're talking about is complete and utter crap - even Steam lets me re-download my games as many times as I need to; surely 14GBytes of upload for Mass Effect 2has to cost them more than the ~750 MBytes from iTunes (and yes, I'm assuming iTunes here). I g

      • What I should do is introduce her to the equivalent of Open Source music. I don't even know what that is like, I haven't tried any. She's at the age where it's all about what her friends are listening to however. Perhaps if I can get her early with some Creative Commons type stuff some of it will stick.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by socsoc ( 1116769 )
      iTunes tells you to back up your music and app library. You encouraged her to purchase them, but not properly store them. While the physical media is different (and yes bandwidth does have a cost), if I put my CDs out on my roof and they get destroyed, Best Buy won't replace them for me.

    • Completely agree .... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      But as others have said, it's *always* really been your responsibility to protect the goods you purchase. If she had invested even $79 or so for an external USB hard drive (a lot less money than she spent on the music itself!), and did regular backups of her data to it, she wouldn't have had this issue in the first place.

      I wouldn't get the ability for a "one time free replacement" of my collection of physical CDs and cassette tapes if they were all destroyed in a fire tomorrow, or they were stolen, or ??

      On

  • I'm really getting sick of all this selfish industry news. Look, it is simple. We have the greatest tool the world has ever known to give our creations to the world and have it archived there for as long as humanity exists. If a business can turn any profit and keep people employed while at the same time sharing it with everyone then that is even better. They don't need record profits, they just need to cover their production costs and the salaries of their employees. As long as they are making enough

  • having an existential crisis is a good definition of humor, but its not a business plan

    the only amount people will spend on music (apart from upper middle class westerners) is zero

    and the internet makes it possible

    you can't beat an army of technologically astute, media hungry, and POOR teenagers. your bought and paid for legislation is unenforceable. your garrison of lawyers can only catch clueless soccer moms and grandmothers

    your only option is to fucking die already, music industry

    the future is artists gi

  • List of Warner Music Group Artists [wikipedia.org]

    I bought Octavarium based on hearing Dream Theater on Spotify. I won't bother with the rest of their albums.

    I'll also post on their Facebook / fansites telling them so.

  • I'm not sure I get this... Right now WB is making *some* money from streaming sites. This money is 100% pure profit, since all expenses are borne by the streaming sites. It's money flowing in that they have to do absolutely nothing for.

    Yet they want to shut down their content on those sites. This will take their profit from some number X > $0 to $0.

    It will be a net loss for WB. No money at all from streaming services.

    I'm not sure I understand their business model. How does this make sense? I thought the

    • I think, in their addled brains, they think of it this way.

      1. We're making $X right now for doing nothing by providing music to these services, and there are people listening to that music and enjoying it.
      2. Those people must not just be casual listeners, instead they must be so excited about listening to Warner music that if we cut it off they'll pay WAY MORE to listen to it from a service WE provide (this would be the fallacy in their reasoning).
      3. Therefore, we should stop the streaming and maybe set
  • I use Pandora all the time. I paid the yearly fee and use the app on my computer as well as on my iPhone. One of the main reasons I bought an iPhone was because at the time Pandora didn't have an app for Blackberry. I've discovered a lot of music through the use of Pandora that I most likely would have never heard otherwise. I don't listen to the radio. Haven't watched any of the so called music channels on tv in years, not that they play music anymore though. Have I heard anything on Pandora that belongs t

  • Well, it's what this whole thing reminds me of. Music simply isn't worth what it used to be because there's now more competition, and more choice in the market place. Warner needs to get smaller very quickly to survive.

    If I ever start a band I will name it "Watching Diplodocus Starve"

  • ...with Warners today, all you have to do is contrast this money-grubbing douche with the likes of Ted Templeman, Lenny Waronker, and Mo Ostin. These were guys who staged and kept alive a renaissance at Warners for over thirty years. They signed amazing people like Hendrix, Zappa, Little Feat, the Doobies, and that's just for starters. Ostin in particular was so loved that artists actually wrote songs for him.

    But this moron...the only thing he's interested in--forgive me for the cliché--is money for no

  • Before the internet, if you wanted to be a truly successful music group, you had to go to the labels. Otherwise, there was no easy to way to get your music heard.

    Now, anyone with a guitar and a microphone can record themselves and post it up for everyone to listen to. There are some people that just shouldn't do this for lack of skill, but this IS a boon to the folks that do have some skill, but are ignored by the labels. The technology is cheap/free to record, mix and render some high-quality original m

  • These things -- bottled water, diamonds, and music -- have much in common. The vendors of these products have created an artificial demand for a plentiful product. We are told that diamonds are exceedingly rare. When someone invents a process to manufacture flawless diamonds, we are told that only "natural" diamonds are proper tokens of affection. Bottled water is the same. We pay more for a gallon of water than for a gallon of high grade 93 octane gasoline. The same with music. There is no shortage of

  • "Bronfman contended that this revenue comes nowhere near what they need in compensation for each individual's enjoyment of each work"

    What if I stream something to see if I like it, only to decide it sucks more massively than Jar-Jar Binks? Will Warner pay me?
    This is one inherent fallacy of attempting to monetize intangibles.

    Another is that someone in the equation will likely overvalue their piece / portion / place, and thereby decrease the enjoyment of all.

    It's obvious the suits running media companies are

  • A subscription model for commodities... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tikkun ( 992269 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @12:21PM (#31114246) Homepage
    ...can make sense, if you make it competitive to other options available to consumers.

    If you're charging $5-$10 a month to download 100s of DRM free mp3s per month that can be easily synced with mobile devices you may have a model on your hands. Want 1000s a month? Want 1000s a month and FLAC? $20 and $30 a month respectively.

    The labels could make this work because:

    1. People like novelty. Publish a great song this month? People stay subscribed.
    2. People like feeling like they aren't being taken advantage of. Being able to stop at any time and keep the tens of thousands of tracks you've downloaded removes the fear of joining in the first place.
    3. People like having their friends know what they like. Syncing up "official" subscriber downloads with social networking sites helps show who the "true" fans are.

    Of course anything Warner does will suck, have horrible design, have tons of DRM and only work on Windows.

  • Don't think this applies in the US (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tweak13 ( 1171627 ) on Friday February 12, 2010 @12:36PM (#31114458)
    I have no idea what this article is talking about. The source is apparently an interview with BBC news, so I'm wondering if this is something that only applies to Britain or maybe Europe in general.

    In the US we have a fantastic little organization called SoundExchange. You may remember them from previous stories on slashdot about how they were trying to destroy internet radio by charging massively inflated prices. Part of the reason it was big news is because in the US internet radio broadcasts fall under a compulsory license. Even if you're an independent artist who is not represented by any of the labels that SoundExchange represents, broadcasters must pay SoundExchange to play your recordings.

    Warner is in the same situation, and cannot opt out of this no matter how much they want to. They could make specific agreements with each and every internet radio station, but all the stations would have to do is say no. If no agreement could be reached it goes right back to the standard terms of SoundExchange.

    I'm not an expert in licensing, but I do work for a radio network that also broadcasts on the internet. During the big SoundExchange debacle last year this is how everything was explained to me. I highly doubt any internet radio service in the US will be in trouble.

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