savenetradio

No doomsday for Net radio...yet

Looks like there's been a truce in the fight over Net radio.

After threatening to impose per-song performance royalties on Net radio stations, which could have increased costs for some Net broadcasters by hundreds of millions of dollars, royalty collection agency SoundExchange offered to delay the new royalty payments until 2008.

Savenetradio.org, a coalition representing Internet radio broadcasters, rejected that previous offer, saying that the threat of drastically increased fees in 2008 was little better than the July 15 deadline, as it would staunch any investment into Net radio. An eleventh-hour court appeal failed, and it looked like … Read more

Owl names that tune and matches more to it

Owl Music Search is a cool tool that was spotlighted at a Creative Commons Salon last night. The potentially endangered Pandora and Last.fm recommend which music you'll like by matching text descriptions of albums, artists and songs. But Owl analyzes the actual waveforms of music files and matches them to similar tunes, many of which have Creative Commons licenses.

When I uploaded Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," Owl dug up 44 tracks by Loretta Lynn, Outkast, the Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson and others, highlighting snippets of their songs that resembled parts of "Hallelujah." Owl has … Read more

Net radio repreive

Looks like the day of Net radio silence worked. Enough publicity was generated that SoundExchange, the organization responsible for collecting royalties on Internet radio broadcasts, has offered to impose a $2,500 maximum fee per broadcaster on July 15, rather than instituting the per-song fees that could have put many small broadcasters out of business and raised costs for big broadcasters into the tens or hundreds of millions (!) of dollars.

Nonetheless, it's only a temporary reprieve: the original fee increase will still go into effect in January 2008, if SoundExchange has its way. SaveNetRadio, the group that organized the … Read more

Internet radio is dead for today; democracy, on the other hand...

In case you've haplessly been attempting to listen to Internet radio streams throughout the day, you might have noticed most are dead. This is by no means a fluke, and on a wider scale, it's a mass protest to the royalty rate increase that passed legislation in early March. The rate increase, which gives the RIAA (whose Web site is coincidentally down today) more money for every track served to listeners, has been the focus of much debate and controversy. The new fees go into effect July 15th.

The new fees don't just affect the smaller broadcasters … Read more

Day of Net radio silence

Tomorrow, some of the most popular and prominent Internet radio stations will go silent to protest the imposition of new fees that many Webcasters claim will drive them out of business.

The protest stems back to a Mar. 2007 decision by the Copyright Royalty Board to impose per-song performance royalties on Web radio, starting at 0.08 cents per song (retroactive to Jan. 1, 2006) and increasing gradually to 0.19 cents per song by 2010. The former rules forced Webcasters to pay a minimum annual fee and 12% of their revenues. (Small Webcasters might be able to abide by these old rules … Read more