Apperently the federal courts have thrown out a challenge by the broadcasting industry against the U.S. Copyright Office, which ruled last year that radio stations must pay extra royalties to broadcast over the Internet.
OK, this is probably one of those things that I just don’t get. Let’s see if I can understand this clearly. Radio Stations pay royalties to play music over the federally controlled air waves. Now the government is trying to say that these same exact companies have to pay an ADDITIONAL FEE to be able to run their exact same broadcast over the Internet? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Radio stations make money off of one thing: advertising revenue. Even though the Internet can technichally give you a global reach, most advertising sold is more of a local flavor. This means that yoru local radio station broadcasting over the Internet is really doing this service just to cater to their local listeners that may get a kick out of listening to radio through their computer. It is the exact same thing that they can get over the free airwaves but just choose to do so through an electronic medium because it is more convenient, right?
I, myself, am a talk radio man. You would think that talk radio would be exempt from this kind of crap, and in truth it is. There is another problem though that makes most of my talk radio unavailable on the Internet to me right now. The mass shutdown occurred when the American Federation for Television and Radio Artists(AFTRA) enforced a new and little noticed
provision of the “Recorded Commercials Contract.” The new provisions went into effect last October. The added provision requires advertisers to pay union talent a minimum 300% of their normal session fee when commercials originally recorded for radio use are rebroadcast on the Internet. Once again I just have to say what kind of bullshit thinking is this? So now I can’t get talk radio over the Internet because a bunch of greedy union voice talent want to get an extra 300%. Right. That’s fair.
An interesting loop hole about that fine print is that Internet Only, Canadian and foreign broadcasts are exempt. This means that I could run ad’s intended for radio to my hearts content on my sites broadcast right now without fear of penalty or extra fee. The minute I hit terrestrial radio though… lights out.. uh huh… dance dance dance.
What it all seems to come down to me is that the industry itself doesn’t seem to realize they are actually hurting the Internet’s growth by doing this type of stuff. Their talent stood a better chance to make more money by being heard on an even great scale potentially due to the unlimited reach of the Internet. Instead there is this perception that the Internet is some how the “bad guy”
that is stealing away their earnings. Who in the long run is hurt by all this? Me, the consumer. Dipshits.
As a side not I would like to point out that apparently Clear Channel has struck a deal with an ad insertion company that will allow them to have their stations streaming on the Internet again by replacing the ads run on their radio broadcasts with special Internet only advertisements. Ad insertion is a great concept, but it is a costly one. Now I don’t know how most radio stations stream their broadcasts to the Internet but I would think there would be an easy way for the audio to the stream to be cut when the main audio board goes to commercial. That would be too easy of a solution of course so I don’t know why I even think of these things.
Anyway, I’m rambling incessently. Sorry. Just pisses me off I can’t listen to all the radio stations I used to be able to.
-WW