A serious threat to the health and diversity of Internet radio has surfaced in a new ruling by the Copyright Royalties Board. They recently ruled that Internet webcasters will have to pay a dramatic increase in royalty fees, an increase that would shut many of us down.
Live365 (where Acoustic Pie lives) estimates that 80% of their stations (comprising mostly niche genres such as “Singer/Songwriter”, of course) won’t survive the increase and that available genres will drop from 260 to 10. Only 10 genres choices. Sounds kind of like the meager fare that traditional AM/FM has been whittled down to, doesn’t it?
I (as well as my newfound friends at the conservative bastion of business reporting, The Wall Street Journal) are baffled by the difference in fees required of Internet radio broadcasters as opposed to conventional and satellite broadcasters. Conventional AM/FM stations don’t pay any performance royalty fees at all ~ only composer royalties. In comparison, my host Live365 has paid millions of dollars in both performance fees and composer fees and they are now increasing these fees even more. It’s just not fair and it doesn’t make sense.
And, to make matters worse, I can almost guarantee that the vast majority of artists on Acoustic Pie never got a cent of those performance fees and probably never will. Those fees are primarily distributed to record labels and major label artists who provide the main support base for the collecting agency, SoundExchange. Acoustic Pie artists are mostly independents who will not find a home in the daily rotation anywhere but on the Internet. It just makes their already too difficult task of finding their audiences that much more difficult.
If you’d like to help, click over to the Acoustic Pie Radio page at http://www.acousticpie.com/Radio.htm. There you’ll find links to where you may read more on the issue, sign petitions, and get easy access to your political representatives to let them know that we need their intervention ~ fast.
Thanks for reading, thanks for listening!
~Kelley
More information and links are found at the: Acoustic Pie Royalties Information page
Or, go directly to the WRITE YOUR REPRESENTATIVES page at SaveNetRadio.org.
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