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On March 2, 2007, The CRB approved royalty rates that will bury any small webcaster, and create a heavy burden even for big broadcasters like Yahoo, AOL Music and Pandora. How high will these rates be? Around 100% of a small webcasters revenue, give or take a few points, in most cases. What?! That's impossible to pay! Yep, it sure is..

How did this happen? The RIAA told the CRB thats what they wanted, and the CRB just gave it to them.

Your're probably thinking, hey that's awful, but who are the the RIAA and CRB?

RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is a lobbying group formed by the five largest record labels. They are embedded in Washington D.C. They make sure laws are written to keep them rich, no matter what. They made headlines a few years ago opening lawsuits against elderly people, single mothers and children for trading music online, even though some of them didn't even have computers. Check out the latest RIAA headlines.

The CRB (Copyright Royalty Board) is part of the US Copyright Office. The Board is charged with determining the royalty rates that would be determined by a willing buyer and a willing seller in a marketplace transaction. They decided to jack the rates beyond a broadcasters means despite decades of royalty rates being 1 - 2% of broadcaster revenue. Raise your right hand if you want to take away consumer choice, hurt working artists, damage small record labels and put small webcasters out of business.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/ ... rnet-radio
In a decision that could drive the nail in the coffin to Internet radio providers, the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has endorsed a proposal by SoundExchange to enact royalty rates for webcasts and streaming music sites that will stay in effect from 2006 until 2010.

SoundExchange, the royalty collecting division of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), will seek to retroactively charge webcasters for streaming content delivered throughout 2006 to users, a decision that could send the sites packing for good.

The new rates will require webcasters to pay for each song streamed to each user, and will increase yearly according to these figures:

2006: $0.0008 to stream one song to one listener

2007: $.0011

2008: $.0014

2009: $.0018

2010: $.0019

Eliot Van Buskirk and Sean Michaels of Wired lament the financial implications of the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board’s decision:

"Those fees will add up quickly for larger webcasters; the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) calculates that, assuming that the average station plays 16 songs per hour, sites would have to pay "about 1.28 cents" per listener per hour using the 2006 rate, and would owe this retroactively, in addition to licensing fees going forward. RAIN's math indicates that the rate would render Internet radio unsustainable, or at the very least, more ad-laden than terrestrial radio -- and that's before the songwriters' licenses are taken into account."