Webcasting... Walter McDonough provides a solution Webcasting is another word for Internet radio. Unlike filesharing, listeners only listen.
There has long been a bottleneck on music distribution. Then came the Internet, and musicians can have unlimited distribution and its no longer just about music fans liking what they know and what they hear on the radio. Suddenly, there is open distribution. And the aim of the record companies, the artists and their fans should be to get as many people as possible to listen to their music. Thats how you break a band and make them popular.
But what were hearing is the record labels saying, Oh no, due to this Internet thing you dont want all these people listening to your music.
Traditionally, fans have been able to enjoy music for free by listening to the radio, but now the record companies are claiming that its bad for musicians if people get to listen to music for free over the Internet. This view appears not to benefit musicians, but is the recording industrys way of attempting to maintain control over the new unlimited means of distribution.
To play music on terrestrial radio in the United States you have to compensate the songwriters not the people who have performed the music. This is unique to the United States.
After the passing of the Digital Performing Right in Sound Recordings Act (1995) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998), there are now laws enacting digital performance rights. This means that performers as well as songwriters are supposed to be compensated for Internet radio and other forms of digital delivery. This is fine, except for the fact that major record labels have not been interested in making their music available online, while at the same time they have taken the vast majority of the copyrights to the performances of popular recorded music.
The copyright consolidators in the music industry, as represented by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), have been trying to make it impossible for people to webcast legally. Joe-Small-webcaster may live in fear of violating something that is impossible to comply with (if the RIAA proposals are implemented), but Sony Music or AOL Time Warner will not be subject to these same fears. The majors have aggregated copyrights in such a way that if you want to play popular music you have to go through them, and they are attempting to leverage that into control of the entire distribution channel.
Before anyone realized the implications, the recording industry got laws passed that would impact digital distribution, before there was even a digital distribution industry or coherent consumer voice capable of defending themselves.
A non-interactive statutory licence was passed which said that, in exchange for having similar (though more limited) broadcast rights to terrestrial radio stations, webcasters would have to pay a fee and comply with numerous other requirements. Now, this fee that everyone who has been broadcasting since 28 October 1998 has agreed to pay retroactively is going to be determined by a group called the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP); and it is supposedly based on market-rate deals.
However, the RIAA, having apparently consolidated control over the majority of valuable performance copyrights, has refused to license on open market terms because they know that if they set an exorbitant rate they will be able to argue that it was actually the market rate. The RIAA is insisting on rates several hundred per cent higher than the market rate and what webcasters are able to pay. The Librarian of Congress was meant to accept or reject, and at this point he has rejected the proposed rates. We have proposed what we believe is a solution to this problem - and several others.
For a list of webcasts visit SHOUTcast and enjoy audio of all imaginable genres - Punk to Middle Eastern
Its coming from the heart
It is intriguing for us at the Future of Music Coalition to see really high rates. Theoretically, the higher the rates are, the more money will be paid out to artists. What is equally clear to me is that if the rates are so high that it makes it impossible to webcast on the Internet (as it appears they may be set), there will be no non-major-label webcasters, and the artists will not be fairly compensated. It is a really ugly situation.
Who are the webcasters? For the most part they are people who are not just out to make a quick buck. They love music and what it contributes to culture. They should be the labels best friends. Here is a whole industry that has popped up to drive sales and provide free marketing and promotion for musicians and the owners of what the musicians have created. And yet the RIAA seems to be trying to force them out of business.
One of the RIAAs proposals has called for forcing webcasters to track the time zones of every single one of their listeners, for each and every song they listen to. Not only is it impossible to track whether each person is listening from California or New York there is absolutely no copyright related benefit to tracking it. The RIAA has tipped their hand that they were attempting to make it impossible for webcasters to comply with the statutory licence.
The RIAA has lost its credibility, and it is greatly damaging to the record industry, which should be looking for ways to make money from these new technologies. The entertainment industry has been fighting against new developments since the piano player came out, since broadcast radio, since the VCR. What did Jack Valenti say in 1982? The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone yet all of a sudden it turns out that they are making half their revenue from the home-rental of movies.
I am not as optimistic as Walter McDonough, because I dont see the RIAA moving an inch (unless they are totally routed). If the recording industry keeps pushing as they do, they may end up losing their copyrights. Its my belief that, in the future, it may be shown that the labels have systemically breached their side of the contracts, which they signed with musicians in exchange for taking their copyrights, and that the copyrights may revert to the artists. As it becomes more and more clear that the record labels are behaving in a way which is neither legally, morally or ethically viable, everyone will focus more on what the recording industry has done wrong in the process of taking copyrights from musicians, while essentially building a monopoly over our popular musical culture.
