Zeitverschwendung

Aus schluss!

Eigentlich als no-sense blog gedacht, muß ich jetzt mal schnell dampf ablassen. Einer meiner "favorite" internet radios hat mir dieses e-mail geschickt:

Dear xxx:

You may have heard, but once again internet radio is facing huge additional
royalties for broadcasting music. These royalties are in addition to the ones
that we pay to ASCAP and BMI, and are a royalty that is only paid by internet
broadcasters. Over-the-air (AM/FM) broadcasters are explicitly exempt from this
royalty; it only applies to internet broadcasters and subscription music
services.

In the past, we paid royalties based on a percentage of our revenues, in our
case 10% of our revenue. But the new royalties don't allow that percentage of
revenue factor, and instead charge us for each song we play times the number of
people listening. This works out to about $8 per average concurrent listener
per month. In 2006, we averaged over 6000 average concurrent listeners per
month, and the royalties we will have to pay for 2006 is about $628,000, over 4
times the amount of money we brought in.

And these rates go up drastically each year, until 2010, where they are 2.5
times their initial rate: by then we will have to pay over $1 million dollars a
year in royalties if we want to stay on the air.

So you can see that this puts us in an impossible position. And to make it even
worse, the rates are retroactive to 2006.

It doesn't seem fair that a small radio service like SomaFM has to pay all these
additional royalties, when over-the-air stations who reach much larger audiences
are exempted from paying them.

If you are in the USA, we would appreciate it if you could sign this online
petition which will be presented to members of Congress.

It's important for us to let Congress know that independent internet radio is
about to be forced out of business.

We need to keep our existing "percentage of revenue" royalty rate structure, or
better yet, have Congress extend the exemption to internet radio stations as
well as terrestrial (over-the-air) stations.

http://www.petitiononline.com/SIR2007r/petition.html

Thanks for all of your support for SomaFM in the past. We will do what we need
to do to keep SomaFM on the air and broadcasting. We love you!

Rusty Hodge,
General Manager and Program Director
SomaFM.com

Was mit Youtube derzeit passiert (nicht ganz zu unrecht), nämlich copyrightcopyrightcopyright, nimmt unglaubliche Auswüchse an.

Möge web2.0 denen den allerwertesten aufreisen!

rock on!

Posted by Beeblebrox on 14.3.07 at 20:15 | Permalink