NPR Takes First Step To Fight Internet Royalties 135
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."
Higher prices (Score:4, Funny)
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Why? Does that make the un-funny magically funny? I'll have to try it.
Nope. Still not funny.
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$120,000 is a low ball (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet stations that stream almost completely music are being saddled with outrageously usurious fees.
Soma FM [somafm.com] predicts their fees will rise from $20,000 today to $600,000 for 2006, and $1,000,000 in 2007.
Loosing stations like Soma would suck. I listen to a little bit of normal broadcast radio (usually just the urban hit station to pick up the occasional deserving top 20 hit), but otherwise its internet only.
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And means exactly the same thing.
Re:$120,000 is a low ball (Score:4, Insightful)
"Today". I do not think that word means what you think it means
Where are these numbers coming from? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Sure, you're failing to take in to account 3 things:
1) The costs are per listener. That's $170/year/listener, now figure they have over 10k listeners...
2) These stations don't currently run commercials, largely because they pay so little. Their calculations are done without running commercials(16 songs/hour), and the calculations with commercials come up with revenue being woefully short.
3) This isn't factoring in other costs. Employees, bandwidth, etc.
Quoting the AC (Score:2)
That would explain it a bit better. Thanks. And if you're going to post something worth reading... don't be a coward!
-Rick
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I'd have modded the parent post Informative instead, but I couldn't get it to log me back in for this page, even tho I have mod points today... geesh!!
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365 * 24 * 60 = 525,600 minutes a year
4 minutes a song -> 131,400 songs/year
131,400 * $0.02 = $2,628 listener/year
Say 1k listeners -> $2.628 million a year
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-Rick
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Reply:There be more piracy in more Higher prices (Score:2)
This is as fascinating as other, newly legal, global organized crime [AKA: corporatist/plutocrat] activities.
RIAA wants more money
Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not going to convince anyone at NPR of anything by ranting on /. - but if I raise the issue and others of like mind read about NPR's tryst with the NAB, maybe others will stop contributing to NPR stations until NPR changes their stance. Maybe some of these people will, like myself, be moved to write NPR during the semi-annual beg-a-thons to explain why they've stopped giving. Maybe, eventually, this i
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Re:Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it? (Score:4, Informative)
Why I no longer support NPR
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/NPR.html [std.com]
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Well, if they're as swayed by his user ID as I am, they'll listen.
Oops, posted to soon. (Score:2)
Re:Oops, posted to soon. (Score:4, Insightful)
LPFM stations were to be held to the exact same technical standards re: interference as (IRONY ALERT) the very same low-power translator stations used by NPR affiliates to repeat their own signals. The difference is that LPFM stations were allowed to originate content, rather than simply retransmit it. I don't see how NPR could raise the interference issue in earnest. No - this was about competition for donation dollars.
-Isaac
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Donations? (Score:2)
Why did I mention college? We set up the low power station at our college in 1979. The field survey was challenging due to the terrain, but we were
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Re:Hurts when your own ox is gored, doesn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that we do not have room for LPFM stations is that the FCC over-licensed the commercial bandwidth, and did not leave enough in reserve for station that verifiably serve a public purpose. The commercial stations then managed to frame the argument so that the public would complain not about the over-licensing of redundant commercial interests, but about the public stations enacting a protectionist stand. The public stations have to be protectionist. No one is threatening to remove a commercial license, and most commercial stations can afford to increase their power. In fact, by putting forth such a arguments one is effect lobbying for the pure commercialization of the airwaves, leaving no room for public radio, much less LPFM.
The issue is greater than LPFM, greater than NPR, greater than Pacifca, greater than the ACN or whatever your favorite Christian network is. Such stations have limited funds and loads of enemies. On a crowded dial, it would be all too easy to create a network of LPFM transmitters that would block the signals of such public stations. Again, I am not saying that NPR is correct in it's actions. I am not generating a scary scenario so to use fear to move people to my position. All I am saying is that the dial is crowded. In some places, there is a scant half megahertz between stations. In some markets a single entity owns much of the commercial licenses. In some markets, the exact same single is broadcast over multiple commercial stations. There is enough bandwidth available for public, commercial, semi-commercial, and LPFM. The problem is that FCC does not take the public airwaves seriously, and allows the private corporations to do whatever they like. Then the private corporations have enough media access so that people believe that it is the public radio fault.
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The idea of a crowded dial is an artificial and archaic one. There's no reason we can't have thousands more low-power FM stations than we currently do. And NPR did work hard to kill this. My university's radio station lost a chance at an LPFM license due to this, so yes, I am going to hold it against them.
On the other hand, CRB is a fucking joke and I hope every member on the panel gets herpes.
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I'd hold out for a resistant strain of gonorrhea.
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Historically false, but thanks for the kind words. After all, past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
-Isaac
Slashdot too? (Score:3, Funny)
This could really hurt NPR (Score:1)
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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.
I for one am glad (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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It's not the RIAA causing this problem.... (Score:3, Insightful)
FM is fueled by big corporate advertising dollars and payola.
Satellite radio is fueled by subscriptions.
Internet radio has a mix of the above and an abundance of free stations sponsored voluntarily by their listeners. Now close your eyes and imagine a world where every car is able to connect to internet
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Re:I for one am glad (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been shown with reasonable efficacy that most artists do not make money from record sales, they make it from touring mostly. Courtney Love had a great rant about that. People do want to buy music they like, but the problem is that they mostly like 'popular' music which is made popular by the 'music industry' because the control the creation and distribution of music/videos.
If that control was broken and dismantled then spread across a much larger group of people and companies, it would represent competition, and create more content, not stifle it. The Internet and digital age is here, bringing with it many opportunities. If MP3 online stores were to become focal points for electronic distribution/sales it would make the whole industry more competative. Music would be priced better, more of it would be available.
Additionally, and more to the point, Internet based radio is now what the radio broadcasting industry used to be before the RIAA members re-arranged it to suit themselves. These same Internet radio stations can front the sales/distribution of music/video media as well.
If the price of a CD was only $7.95USD there would be little point in piracy for many people. If you could get that music at reasonable prices, free of DRM, it would be a booming business without the deficit of having to line the pockets of the current big players in the music industry.
There are hundreds of ways to re-organize the music industry, but the only successful ones I can think of do not include music distributors continuing to get rich while artists do not. There are far too few artists who actually do benefit from the RIAA, despite what we are told to believe. For every artist they do support there are ten more they do not.
If that is not bad enough, the RIAA decides (more or less) what we get to listen to, which band becomes popular... in fact, they have way too much influence on the music industry. The fact that I and many other people no longer have any use for broadcast radio because of the ruination they are bringing on their own industry is the reason they need to go. They ARE ruining the future possibilities of budding artists even as we write on
Its time for other people to share in the control and management of the music industry. There is no evidence that the current regime is doing anything but destroying the industry for their own gain.
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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 ord
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Why do public radio stations have to pay at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do public radio stations have to pay at all (Score:2, Informative)
The CRB specifically noted that they don't care what your revenues are -- all they cared about was making sure that the recording artists got "fairly" compensated for the use of their songs. That's why they shifted away from the revenue-based payment model to the performance-based one.
I disagree; there is no reason to exempt a certain class of stations from paying f
Re:Why do public radio stations have to pay at all (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe one day when we get over all this IP crap.
All musicians are Public Servants? (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Pass law declaring all musicians are Public Servants
2) Stop paying creators and workers
3) Profit!
Interesting suggestion, but I'd rather see...
1) Halt misappropriation of taxpayer monies
2) Defund government funded political propaganda
3) Freedom!
Thanks for the offer, but I can decide whom I p
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There's Public, and then there's Public (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, NPR doesn't get much public money [npr.org]:
As for the stations themselves:
National Public Radio is public in the sense of being a public service, not in the sense of being primarily funded by tax dollars.
Time to establish the seperation of News and State (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering [wikipedia.org]
1) Taxpayers pay out nearly 500 million a year
2) Politians redistribute it to the CPB
3) CPB distributes it to numerous stations
4) Stations buy programming from NPR
5) NPR claims most income is private, and not public supported
I think it's time to establish the seperation of News and State.
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And if those stations only get 13% of their funding from CPB, as stated, that means at maximum NPR gets 15% of its money from CPB, directly or through member stations' dues. Less, actually -- according to the 2005 NPR Annual Report (it's a PDF on the link cited in my previous post), 39% of NPR's revenue for that year came from station programming fees.
So that's 13% of 39%, or 5.1% of the total. Factor in the 6% of stations' funding that comes from state and local governments -- again that's 6% of that 3
Re:Why do public radio stations have to pay at all (Score:2)
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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 wa
industry standard (Score:1)
I actually read the ruling... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a bit surprised that there was little to no discussion concerning the relative changes in the fee structure - and that the content industry basically got every cent they asked for (except the 25%).
I don't know the players, but I'd say that there was some pretty significant bias in the panel before the parties even began to talk.
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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
Save Our Internet Radio!!! (Score:2, Informative)
this law doesn't just affect over the air radio stations, but all streaming web casts. this is a bad deal, and it is supposed to be applied retro actively to 2006 (which will basically put all streaming radio stations out of business).
you can write your congressman or representative here [congress.org].
for more info on how this will affect streaming radio, check out www.SaveOurInternetRadio.com [saveourinternetradio.com]. i found out about this through soma fm's news section [somafm.com] (soma fm is an internet radio station i listen to, i am not affiliated
Is that math correct? (Score:1)
Then it states: By our estimates, WXPN could be paying about $1 million a year in royalties under the CRB's ruling.
To rack one million bucks in one year, wouldn't you have to play 555 million songs in that one year period? That's about 63,000 per minute. Wow! Those must be some really short songs.
Re:Is that math correct? (Score:4, Informative)
10,000 listeners * $0.0008 * 15 songs/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year= $1,051,200.00 a year
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It was pointed out above that those fees are per listener, something I didn't see in the original article.
As Emily Latella would say: "Oh. That's quite different. Never Mind."
NPR - being destroyed from within (Score:2, Insightful)
With friends like these (Score:1)
Why Play at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
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station. For my own favorite, indie on 3WK [3wk.com], it's painful. The owners
would be happy to do so if there were sufficient material available however, they don't
have the time or resources to actually track down 100% "free" content. In addition,
they'd really like to be able to play the occasional track from Modest Mouse or Beck,
as their mood suits them.
Another RIAA Ripoff (Score:3, Informative)
The new streaming royalty rates don't increase the royalties paid to musicians and record labels, they just increase the royalties collected from streamers. The RIAA (ie SoundScan, and predecessors/competitors BMI & ASCAP) have never paid all of the collected royalties to its rightful owners. Instead, the collection agencies keep it for themselves. I hope you're not surprised.
So it's excellent news that NPR is fighting this move. I hope NPR's entry also encourages other well-positioned orgs to complain. These new rates completely eliminate hobbyist and personal streaming to friends, by keeping the $500 per year minimum fee that is now equal to the per-play fee for supporting many dozens of simultaneous listeners. That minimum should be totally discarded, even more important than lowering the arbitrarily high (but still somewhat affordable, until it rises again over the next couple/few years) per-play rates that also squeeze out noncommercial and small commercial webcasters.
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NPR is very much to the left. Don't get mad at "Morning Edition" for covering the White House just because it happens to have a Republican in it. When the president farts, it's still news.
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Re:NPR going down the crapper (Score:5, Insightful)
As to NPR being to the left, I think that they present a pretty balanced coverage of the news. If anything they cater to a younger audience than CNN and Fox and I think that a lot of the leftist criticism comes from not so much from a political slant but from a generational slant. The style of news and reporting that is geared towards the 45 and under crowd may seem to have a liberal bias not so much from the content but from the tone.
Re:NPR going down the crapper (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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No she's not (Score:3, Informative)
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Not that it matters.
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You mean there's less reporting and even more sensationalism?
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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 celeb
Other good show: This American Life (Score:1)
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Left, Right and Center [kcrw.com] is also a good, weekly discussion-style show over current events. Less listener interaction and too short, but still, generally good commentary.
And Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me [npr.org] is a hilarious weekly quiz / comedy show about current events and pop culture.
I catch all three of these, week-in, week-out. They're fantastic
gah not Diane Rehm (Score:2)
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I assume you're referring to her voice as an interviewer, which you call "miserable"? That's because she has a condition called spasmodic dysphonia [wikipedia.org], in which involuntary spasms of the musculature around the larynx cause abnormal fluctuations in, e.g., pitch when speaking.
If you don't like her SD, that's fine; I hope it never happens to you. But if you listen to what she says instead of getting hung up on how her voice sounds (and she does
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What is "left" or "right" very much depends on where you stand. The problem with comments like this one is that what gets called "left" in the United States would count as some form of "right" in most other places in the world.
Want proof? Think about the last time you turned the dial to the socialist, communist, anarchist media outlets? Oh, yeah, that's right - those outlet's don't exist in the United States. You think that happened by accident?
Further, some people have done an analysis of NPR's guest l [fair.org]
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No offense, but if you'd rather hear from policy makers and experts, they already have dozens of media outlets that serve your needs. The United States needs more diversity of voices. We need more diversity of "experts". We need commentary from more people that are impacted from policies - rather than "expert" that have nothing at stake.
As for your claims of arbitary categories, it's not too hard really. Politicians and "experts" are typically "official sources". "Students" and the "general public" are no
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I already know how people feel about issues, and NPR does plenty of reporting on opinion polls. I want to hear from experts and policy makers. I also want to hear from labor and NGO leaders. However, and am pretty sure that I hear from them quite a bit on NPR... this is why I found the categories to be so arbitrary - why would the head of the AFL-CIO not be in the first category with politicians and experts? I'm not stupid - I real
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It's a share of voice question. If you are going to talk what share of voice corporations have in the media, then you need to identify the share of voice of different interests - such as organized labor. The question I find more interesting is what is the share of voice for unorganized labor? Who are the "experts" speaking for Wal-Mart, Starbucks and other non-unionized employees?
The problem with the credential question is who gets left out. I don't have time for stupid, uninformed people either, but I ha
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I'd also argue that there's not too much that can be done about people stupid enough to fall for propaganda, and they aren't really worth having
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and All-Talk NPR doesn't expose the soft-white, racist, sexist, Euro-centric, underbelly of NPR Classical.
At least that's how it is in Vermont - all dead white guys, all day long (with breaks for news and a 20-minute weather forecast at noon). Maybe other NPR's play other types of classical music representative of our diverse culture?
At least the Jazz is good at night.
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