
How’s your iTunes doing? Plenty of music on your hard drive? I’ve got 5,550 songs, 29.22 GB. Movies? None yet, DVDs work great for me. TV Shows? A few, generally when I forget to set the VCR. Podcasts? I subscribe to eight of them, listen to them when I’m on the road. Audiobooks? None. Radio Stations? Lots, I love the selection.
I believe a massively overlooked feature of iTunes is the Radio category. There are currently 1,429 web radio stations available, in 21 categories. Most can be listened to for free. Some are the web stream of a regular over the air radio station, others are hobbyists legally sharing their love of music with the world.
Unfortunately, a March 2 decision by the Copyright Royalty Board will massvely shut down many of these online stations. Each web based radio station had to pay a certain amount of money to SoundExchange, a Washington DC based organization, to cover the performance rights to the music that is played. The old standard was a percentage of revenue, roughly 10% of revenues.
The new rate is no longer based as a percentage, but a set amount per song per listener (per play). The rate for 2007 is $0.0011 cents per play. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up very quickly. Let’s say a station had 400 listeners, for 8 hours. And you play 15 songs per hour. That multiplies out to $52.80 for the day. Multiply that by 250 work days a year, and you end up with $13,200 owed just in performance royalties. There are also costs for the streaming.
Many web radio stations had the costs well under control. But these new rates are going to kill off many of the small niche stations. My own station, Christmas Music 24/7, in 2006 had a total of $1,200 in revenues. I paid out the minimum performance royalty of $2,000. In December 2006 I ended up as the third most popular station out of the 10,000 stations at Live365.com.
Under the new performance royalty rates, I owe $11,000. Oh, didn’t I mention? The new rates are retroactive to January 1, 2006 and payment is due on July 15, 2007. So my station is now only available to paid subscribers of Live365. And probably this Christmas season will be a bit less merry for the thousands of people that listened to me last year. Now imagine what is happening with the other 1,428 stations listed in iTunes. Many of these stations may go dark on July 15th. And I’d guess that some future version of iTunes will no longer have a Radio category in the Library.
What can be done about this? Call your Representative and ask for their support of HR 2060. Call both your Senators to support S 1353, the Internet Radio Equality Act. The IREA will set the rate for performance royalties at 7.5% of revenues, the same as the rate for satellite radio. You can get tons of information on this issue at SaveNetRadio.org.
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2007\/05\/17\/itunes-soon-to-be-missing-a-feature\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_6a890d00145bcd5fbfb983f06cfa0396","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}