Music groups reach accord on royalties

Five music industry trade groups have reached what they call a breakthrough agreement on how royalties should be handled for streaming music online.

The groups, which represent record labels, music publishers, songwriters, and music Web sites, say their proposal would resolve what has been a source of strife between the music industry and Web sites that offer on-demand streaming services.

Under the agreement, sites like Napster and Imeem would have to begin paying royalties of about 10.5 percent of revenue. Download services like Amazon MP3 and iTunes already pay such fees. And online radio sites saw a major royalty hike last year. Pandora, one such site, may be on the brink of going out of business due to that rate increase, according to its founder, Tim Westergren.

The organizations involved were the Digital Media Association, the Nashville Songwriters Association International, the National Music Publishers Association, Recording Industry Association of America, and the Songwriters Guild of America.

They have submitted their plan to the Copyright Royalty Judges, a panel of copyright judges, for approval.

[HlLLARY CLITON]

If Pandora and the like have to close I'm betting music pirating will increase

[dascha1]

I applaud this move by the associations. I'm sure it wasn't easy organizing these folks to agree on something. Let's see how this trickles to other parts of the economy for their associations to all come together to fix something that is broken on a much larger figure.

[jimbo2150]

Is there a link to it yet? What does the plan propose? Will it help streaming radio stations from going belly-up due to outrageous rate hikes? How come no serious questions were answered?

[jimbo2150]

Is there a link to it yet? What does the plan propose? Will it help streaming radio stations from going belly-up due to outrageous rate hikes? How come no serious questions were answered?

-- UPDATE: My question has been answered: NO.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-techblog24-2008sep24,0,4997943.story

[mfvrdotorg]

Interesting evolution that concerns us all. I would expect a new wave of
enforcement actions online and a continued wave of non-payments to writers by
publishers ;)))