LABELS SHOT IN THE FOOT AGAIN?
They got what they wanted;
will they now lose what they had
Copyright, 2002, David Marsh, all rights reserved
Last week, the record-company cartel for the first time
gained a fee from U.S.-based radio stations.
That, not the specific rate, marks the real breakthrough of
last week's ruling by the Librarian of Congress (LoC) that
established fees for webcasting recorded music. Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) mouthpiece
Cary Sherman shrieked that "artists and record companies will
subsidize the webcasting businesses of multibillion-dollar
companies like Yahoo!, RealNetwroks and Viacom."
The LoC actually played into the hands of both the RIAA's
five-member label cartel and the big webcast powers. It did
this by using as its royalty model the agreement struck between
Yahoo! and the RIAA. This meant rejecting a rate based on
percentage of webcaster, like that which songwriters and music
publishers get from both broadcasters and webcasters.
The per-song standard ensured an amount of money owed far
beyond what any small webcaster can pay. Since the rates are
retroactive to 1998, some web stations owe several hundred
thousand dollars each, payable in October. Smaller webcasters
like SomaFM, French ambient station BlueMars, and Tag's Trance
Trip folded before the ink dried on the decision.
Some say the RIAA has committed suicide, since little
webcasters expose so many kinds of records and targeted core
audiences. But this misses the real point which, as Andrew
Orlowski of www.theregister.co.uk
points out, is that the RIAA "want complete control." The only way that the RIAA cartel can
achieve such control is through alliances with large
webcasters-the kind who _can_ afford the new rates. None of the
big webcasting entities screamed loud.
The typical comment,
from Alex Alben, of RealNetworks, was "It's a step in the right
direction." Live365, the largest Internet broadcaster with 8.4
million Arbitron-certified broadcast hours a month, has had a
plan, based on the projected rate, since February to pay $1.5
million in fees plus a monthly charge of $200,000. The new
plan, which cuts the rate per song from an earlier-proposed $0.0014 cents a song to
$0.0007 cents, cuts those sums in half.
In contrast, Live365 points out that many of the 40,000
webasters who use its service, some paying as little as $6.95 a
month to do their shows, would now face at least a $500 license
fee and will have to subsidize Live365's record royalties.
Just as broadcast "deregulation" virtually wiped out small
radio stations, the LoC's new rates ensure that webcast
survivors will belong to very wealthy companies who can afford
them. Clearly, that's now government policy, summed up by the
LOC's rationalization: ". . . many Webcasters are currently
generating very little revenue, [so] a percentage-of-revenue
rate would require copyright owners to allow extensive use of
their property with little or no compensation."
As I've pointed
out many times, protecting "copyright owners" means protecting
big business, not artists. That the Librarian of Congress views
songs solely as property, discarding their status as culture,
is even more appalling.
As the stranglehold of big broadcasters became too much to
endure in the '80s and '90s, one result was the rise of a
pirate (so-called micropower) radio movement. Pirate radio
became so pervasive that the FCC tried to create micropower
licenses; big broadcasting stopped that in its tracks by
corralling a batch of its pet legislators to object.
Some pirates became Webcasters. They (and many others) will
likely become "pirates" again rather than pay rates set to
destroy them. If the FCC couldn't police such stations when
they needed relatively large transmitters, how is the
government going to catch Web "pirates"?
All Web pirates will be aware that it was the cartel labels
who drove them out of legitimacy. This means an opportunity to
expose more of the RIAA's music will be truned into one more
salad of snarling hatred. You don't even have to hope the RIAA
chokes on it. Plummeting sales figures show it already is.
Veteran music journalist and author Dave Marsh writes this column for
Starpolish.com, dmusic.com and counterpunch.com. He edits Rock & Rap
Confidential (rockrap.com). Posted by permission of the author; Copyright, 2002,
David Marsh.