A bill was introduced in Congress on Thursday that provides a ray of hope for net radio stations, who are facing life-threatening royalty fee increases of 300% to 1200% due to a recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB). H.R. 2060 The Internet Radio Equality Act, which was introduced by Reps. Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Don Manzullo (R-IL), would give net radio companies, or webcasters, as they are known, the option of two royalty schemes.
It would set the rate at 7.5% of the webcaster’s revenue “directly related to” its transmission of sound recordings, or 33 cents per hour of sound recordings transmitted to a single listener. The new CRB rules apply a royalty of eight cents $.0008 per song per listener, retroactive back to 2006. That fee would climb to $.19/song/listener $.0019 by 2010. (Note: boy, did I have it wrong originally, by a factor of 100. Correction made thanks to an alert reader.)
A new group, Save Net Radio, has kicked off what seems to be a sophisticated lobbying campaign to rally support behind the new bill. The group has devoted a page to helping visitors contact their congressional representative by allowing them to 1. find the name and contact information of the right Member of Congress through zip code searches and 2. linking to pages that outline the issues.
Powered by a firm called Capital Advantage, the online tools also allow visitors to sign up for legislative updates and find out who the key votes will be when push comes to shove on legislation’s fate.
Not only that, but members of Save Net Radio have engaged in a sophisticated email campaign to garner customer pressure on Members of Congress. Pandora, for example, sent me an email this morning letting me know that the group’s recent call that supporters fax their members of Congress shut down “the entire fax infrastructure” on Capitol Hill. As a consequence, Pandora ended up delivering boxes of faxes to “every” Congressional office.
Pandora also informed me that my Congressman is Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and provided me with his phone number so that I could call his office and ask that he co-sponsor the new bill. All told, 200,000 Pandora listeners have weighed in with their representatives on this issue.
That’s what I call an effective, immediate and savvy lobbying campaign. Time, however, is running against this mobilized core of companies — as a clock on the SaveNetRadio site so stressfully states (it tallies the time down to seconds, counting backwards), the new CRB rates are slated to go into effect on May 15.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:26 AM|Comments(1)
Cynthia - I think the royalties as indicated in your piece are off by a factor of 100 - it's not 8 cents to 19 cents, but .08 cents per song per user to .19 -- i.e., $.0008 to $.0019. Still the same scale of increase, but the base per song is lower. I checked against the bill and the substitute rate of 33 cents ($.33) per hour - not per song - seems to be correct.
Posted by: SteveM at April 27, 2007 3:12 PM
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