If you enjoy your music over the web, this should be of interest. The Copyright Royalty Board has raised its rates on streaming broadcast. A number of these companies would have to pay more than 100% of their total income.
Wired News
Here is a some information posted about the proposed pricing:
The new rates, just announced today, are retroactive to 2006, and
increase rapidly each year. The rates per performance are as follows:
$0.0008 in 2006
$0.0011 in 2007
$0.0014 in 2008
$0.0018 in 2009
At first glance, those seem like fairly small numbers: eight
ten-thousandths of a dollar, eleven ten-thousandths of a dollar, and so
on. When you actually do the math, however, you see the truth revealed.
The average radio station plays 16 songs in an hour. Under this system,
that would be equivalent to 16 performances.
0.0011 x 16 = 0.0176
Still a fairly small number - under two cents. But now assume this
station has 1000 listeners. That means that, in one hour, the station
would be billed for 16,000 performances.
0.0011 x 16000 = 17.60
That’s $17.60 an hour. Now we’re starting to see how expensive this truly is. Multiply that by 24 hours a day.
17.60 * 24 = 422.40
$422.40 a day. But there’s 365 days in a year.
422.40 * 365 = 154176
$154,176 for the year in performance royalties alone for a station
with 1000 listeners. And that’s just for 2007: it gets even worse. In
2008, the cost rises to $193,536 for the year. In 2009, it goes up to
$248,832. Even for a much smaller station, the royalties owed are huge.
Of course, these figures don’t include the other set of rights that
Internet radio stations are required to purchase, which must be
licensed separately from an agency like SESAC or ASCAP, or the
cost of bandwidth and server capacity. When you add all these costs
together, you can easily see why nobody, save perhaps a megacorporation
like AOL or Yahoo, could afford to pay these rates.