14 DAY TRIAL // Exactly as the subtitle says it, RIAA seem to be unable to quench their thirst for money and especially after the open declaration of war made by Apple Inc. in Steve Jobs' words, they started to understand that their money sources are most likely to become substantially thinner.
And we had little time to wait until the crap blasted. First of all, the unofficial pressures against the "rebel" EMI which were on the right track but have quickly been reduced to silence; I mean, how stupid do you think we are? First you jump in joy explaining us and sharing the "very positive feedback obtained after the DRM-free track released online as part of an experiment" just to ask for ridiculous sums of money from webcasters the next two weeks and obviously knowing that they would refuse to pay this advance money... so in less than one month you went from rebel general to a scared soldier with pooped pants and then back to the DRM-side. Shame...
Next, the RIAA rediscussed the royalty fees by means of the associated Sound Exchange (major and few indie labels) that have made a proposal whose goal was to raise the taxes per song per listener from their actual $0.0008 to a $0.0019 in 2010 (which isn't at all that far as some of you might think). With quite a few debates, the lapdogs from the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) have adopted the Sound Exchange's proposal and rejected the plenty of arguments provided by the IWA (International Webcasters Association).
If we make the calculations, we'll quickly see that things are slowly leading towards the death of internet radio: the 2006 rates add up 1.28 cents per listener per hour per channel even for the small webcasters whose due will go at $500 per channel per year, the least. Now think of larger companies specialized in this direction and re-do the sums... grim, isn't it?
Not only will a lot of radios disappear, but the existing ones will have to switch for more advertising-loaded broadcasts which you all agree that suck a lot more than I am allowed to write down and publish. Of course, this is just one solution, the listener-oriented one: the other could be simply bigger fees for memberships... which is not at all good.
It still remains to be seen whether these calculations the CRB made will also apply for the custom radio stations. Apart from this... please be seated as the largest pile of crap is about to follow now, in the end of this article: all the money mentioned above (tax/song/listener/channel at a 16 tracks/hour rate) means only the money for RIAA and does not include the songwriter's royalties! Now, you can swear as much as you like... for should things not change soon, it's a "bye-bye, webcasts" situation. Now see why we all oppose RIAA and their machinations?
See how things are gonna go crappier by the year if things remain this way and the webcasters rehearing request comes to the same end: -2006: $0.0008 to stream one song to one listener -2007: $.0011 -2008: $.0014 -2009: $.0018 -2010: $.0019
Note: I am again looking for the RIAA toilet paper image you'll all see at the beginning of these sad words.
