Zema Bus
08-23-2008, 04:34 PM
From one year ago:
Pandora would play him a song based on his own selection criteria and then, depending on whether he thumbed it up or down, gradually finetuned its appreciation of his musical taste. When he heard something he really liked, he'd click on the album cover, learn more about it and often end up buying it there and then. Both as a professional musician and as a consumer, Wilson thought he might just be witnessing a glimmer of the rebirth the music industry so desperately needs.
That was until May 3, when he logged on to find a message from Pandora founder Tim Westergren. "Dear Pandora Visitor," it read, "we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the US."
"It's a bit of a drag," the Daddy Cool singer says. "For a while it was fantastic. I was hearing all this great new shit! You'd just click on the link to Amazon and it would arrive in the mail a week later.
"I bought more CDs in six months than in the previous three or four years put together. So it was actually very good for business."
But not good enough, apparently, for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Today, Mr Westergren and about 30,000 other US net radio stations are facing drastically revised licensing restraints that, according to US industry analysts, will put 90 per cent of them out of business.
A recent ruling by the US Copyright Royalty Board has meant royalties that Pandora and other net radio stations are required to pay have skyrocketed. And the ruling applies retrospectively from January last year.
Under the ruling, the rate will rise each year until 2010. But Pandora could be gone long before that as Mr Westergren's site and a host of others collapse under the weight of unpaid record label royalties owed to royalty collection agency SoundExchange.
"In the face of those rates, we can't carry on," Mr Westergren says.
Article here. (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/08/08/1186530432196.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2)
The latest:
In the last 12 months, deals have been cut between SoundExchange and Internet radio’s closest competitors – satellite and cable radio – that set their royalty rates at less than half of what webcasters pay. Being asked to pay an irrationally and unjustifiably higher royalty rate than its competition puts Net radio at a significant competitive disadvantage, but these deals do seem to have established the “price of music” for non traditional radio providers, a price we are more than happy to pay.
We need your help to remind Congress that though Internet radio is still on the air and artists are still being paid for their work by webcasters, nothing has been resolved and we need them to act. Call your Senators and your Representative and ask them to co-sponsor the Internet Radio Equality Act, H.R. 2060 and S. 1353. All the information you need is right here.
More info here. (http://www.savenetradio.org/)
I've bought many songs off of Amazon after hearing them first on an Internet radio station. Why doesn't the RIAA get it?
Pandora would play him a song based on his own selection criteria and then, depending on whether he thumbed it up or down, gradually finetuned its appreciation of his musical taste. When he heard something he really liked, he'd click on the album cover, learn more about it and often end up buying it there and then. Both as a professional musician and as a consumer, Wilson thought he might just be witnessing a glimmer of the rebirth the music industry so desperately needs.
That was until May 3, when he logged on to find a message from Pandora founder Tim Westergren. "Dear Pandora Visitor," it read, "we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the US."
"It's a bit of a drag," the Daddy Cool singer says. "For a while it was fantastic. I was hearing all this great new shit! You'd just click on the link to Amazon and it would arrive in the mail a week later.
"I bought more CDs in six months than in the previous three or four years put together. So it was actually very good for business."
But not good enough, apparently, for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Today, Mr Westergren and about 30,000 other US net radio stations are facing drastically revised licensing restraints that, according to US industry analysts, will put 90 per cent of them out of business.
A recent ruling by the US Copyright Royalty Board has meant royalties that Pandora and other net radio stations are required to pay have skyrocketed. And the ruling applies retrospectively from January last year.
Under the ruling, the rate will rise each year until 2010. But Pandora could be gone long before that as Mr Westergren's site and a host of others collapse under the weight of unpaid record label royalties owed to royalty collection agency SoundExchange.
"In the face of those rates, we can't carry on," Mr Westergren says.
Article here. (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/08/08/1186530432196.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2)
The latest:
In the last 12 months, deals have been cut between SoundExchange and Internet radio’s closest competitors – satellite and cable radio – that set their royalty rates at less than half of what webcasters pay. Being asked to pay an irrationally and unjustifiably higher royalty rate than its competition puts Net radio at a significant competitive disadvantage, but these deals do seem to have established the “price of music” for non traditional radio providers, a price we are more than happy to pay.
We need your help to remind Congress that though Internet radio is still on the air and artists are still being paid for their work by webcasters, nothing has been resolved and we need them to act. Call your Senators and your Representative and ask them to co-sponsor the Internet Radio Equality Act, H.R. 2060 and S. 1353. All the information you need is right here.
More info here. (http://www.savenetradio.org/)
I've bought many songs off of Amazon after hearing them first on an Internet radio station. Why doesn't the RIAA get it?