Deal Offered To Small Webcaster Taken By Only 24 Stations

The ongoing struggle between small webcasters and SoundExchange, the industry’s designated royalties enforcer, continues unabated. While ordinary user are generally unaware of the battle, this one could be the fight that leaves the major corporations in complete control of music on the web, as the Copyright Royalty Board’s ruling concerning online royalties would put small webcasters out of business. The deal the SoundExchange offered was so tilted against the small webcasters that only 24 of them signed on.

The deal would have webcasters pay SoundExchange 10% of their gross revenue up to $250,000, and 12% of gross revenue above that. Stations would be limited to $1.25 million or less in annual revenues and 5,000,000 aggregate tuning hours (”ATH”) a month to remain eligible. The numbers seem large to those not in the business, but the small webcasters voted by their absence, generally claiming that the deal would keep them from growing their business.

It’s a tangled story. The Radio and Internet Newsletter (rain.com) has more.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Radio, LMNEditor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.