I'm Glad To Know Somebody Is Making Money With Streaming

This is interesting because it is ASCAP and not the RIAA. It's the same fee's the radio stations pay to music publishers, where as Soundexchange aka RIAA is paid to the record labels.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080...-royalties.html

A couple more interesting points.

These guys made money on music streaming.

AOL would not supply shoutcast numbers. This is really important because it's theorized that Shoutcast is still the bastion of "illegal" Internet Radio broadcasting and per the rules, if you publish a direct link to a stream from your website, you are required to pay ASCAP/BMI/SEASAC a fee based on the number of pageviews for your website. Notice, I didn't say webpage, I said website. Some people have gotten around this by making a "seperate" website to launch the stream.

Anyway, I really hope this will push Yahoo, AOL, et al to dump their broadcasting divisions. The only way we will ever get out from under this oppresion is for the whole system to fail and musicans and labels actually stop receiving any money.

I'm jaded.....

so if we embed an imeem playlist would we then be responsible for paying fees?

I don't think so, but that's a bit different from what I understand. Sort of like embedding Youtube videos. At the end of the day, they are responsible for the costs.

ok. That makes sense.

In regard to them making money, I'm not surprised that these large corporations can make money on the streaming. Especially when they are providing the stream themselves and have their full marketing might behind everything that they do. It's the little guys again that don't make any (or much) money.

Here is something interesting from another article about this....

Jonathan Potter of Digital Media Association, a trade organization devoted to companies competing in online audio and video sectors, said the Web services involved absolutely want to fairly compensate songwriters and music publishers.

"We are disappointed, however, that the court ruled that online services' royalties should be based in part on service-wide revenue," Potter said, "(and) not simply on revenue directly attributable to music usage."

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9933626-7.html?tag=nefd.top

This amount was based on total revenue and not just revenue attributed to the music pages. IMHO, this is very, very bad because it solidifies the RIAA's argument that fee's should be based on all revenue, rather than a subset assigned to music.

Wow..... What happens when we no longer broadcast, but have the word Radio in our domain? Are they going to come after us then?

Sheesh.....