A ruling on March 2 from the Copyright Royalty Board, an arm of the Library of Congress, imposed strict new terms on the licensing of copyrighted songs for Internet broadcast that may doom even the best-run, best-funded webcasting operations.
In a hearing last week by the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in Washington, chairman Ed Markey, D-Mass., called the CRB ruling a "body blow to many nascent Internet radio broadcasters" and said that that the decision would hurt "fledgling entrepreneurs" as well as public broadcasters and smaller stations.
The CRB ruling determines the rates that Internet broadcasters must use to reimburse copyright owners and performing artists for the right to play their music over the Internet. To the disappointment of webcasters big and small, the new schedule set an aggressive schedule of per song royalty hikes, with proceeds paid to SoundExchange, an artists' group set up to manage and distribute digital performance royalties.
From $.0007 (.07 cents) per performance in 2005, royalties would rise to $.0008 per performance, retroactive to Jan. 1, 2006, and keep rising yearly until 2010, when the per performance royalty would cap out at $.0019 per performance. No provisions were made for small commercial webcasters who lobbied for an alternative royalty system based on a percentage of their streaming-related revenue.
How does this impact Maccaradio?
This sux- because it essentially makes it impossible to run streaming music sites-- it even states that radio stations who stream may not be able to with these royalty rates that don't take into account actual listenership #s, etc.
