I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Hey, RIAA? Fuck you. You fucking no good thieving punks. Fuck you very much.

And there's us, like fules, playing music that other people hadn't heard before and encouraging sales. OMG, I mean, how stupid have we been?!

Looks like a real operation foot bullet on the part of SoundExchange. Didn't labels used to pay radio stations to play their stuff? We sure could use a little payola now.

What this will really do to Internet broadcasting, if it holds up as the worst case scenario that could be taken, is what the RIAA has already done to over-the-air radio, which is turn it into a talk medium. No RIAA music = no royalty issues. I think there will be opportunities created as a result, but for those of us who also enjoy sharing music, this arrangement, if it stands, bites.

But still, if LoudCity pulls the plug for cost and exposure reasons, we may as a community still have some options, if our service can be modified to avoid the "broadcast" model. In other words, if we have some means of authenticating listeners as MeCha members, and run a private streaming service, I think we don't have exposure as a broadcaster. Thus, a privately operated server, streaming programming only to authenticated community members would be a different licensing animal, altogether, much like Muzak, from a licensing perspective, I would think.

If this arrangement does stand, I think LoudCity and others are going to find a commercial plateau with the RIAA pretty quickly. Record labels and musicians don't want to stop revenues, they want to increase them. Non-commercial small operations such as Radio Mecha are meaningless to them, except as minor additional exposure. So, while I appreciate the heads up, wendell, I think it's not a death knell, just yet.

*makes donation to the EFF*

relevant to your interests

And THAT is why I make my own music. Seriously.

For noncommercial webcasters

Note that noncommercial is defined as government, education, or registered non-profit. We pay commercial rates.

We've also been paying LoudCity based on the 2002 rates, which only go up a penny in 2006 (if they have to ding us for that). But I don't know if we were required to meet a $500 minimum before.

Google math tells me our aggregate tuning hours fee should be under $20. I assume we weren't paying that little due to the fundraiser, so maybe our minimum just goes up?

You have to ask the people who actually pay for it (of whom I am NOT one), but based on this, the old royalty rates had a $500 per YEAR minimum per channel. If we were paying significantly less, then LoudCity was getting by as a single channel and not a bunch of channels. Still, the retroactivity is going to hit LoudCity hard.

And from what little background I've been able to get, the "old rates" are apparently less than what was originally "negotiated" in 2002, probably because they went with a "percentage of revenue" basis (like broadcast radio) rather than a "per listener" basis, and it could be revised again (Somebody has 15 days to appeal).

Finally, I realize that this has not been "officially announced", but rather was "leaked" by an "internet news source", but one that has been around for several years and apparently reliable before. So, there's a chance that this is a false alarm, and if so, I apologize and will shut up.

Lazy question: Does the RIAA implicitly represent all recording companies in the US simply by virtue of its existing, or do companies have to explicitly sign up as members or something? In other words, does it make sense to, or is it even possible to, find conventional record labels that have nothing to do with this gobshite of an organisation, and only buy music from them?

It doesn't represent all labels, and RIAA Radar provides ways of determining if a cd you're interested in is on their list. It also has an Indie 100 page, showing the top-selling (Amazon) non-RIAA albums, updated daily.

March is boycott RIAA month. But why stop at March?

"...March is boycott RIAA month. But why stop at March?"
posted by taz 04 March | 05:40

taz, since much of the music in which I'm personally interested is released on RIAA member labels, I'm willing to avoid broadcasting on Radio Mecha for the rest of the month of March, particularly since, like wendell, I haven't paid for the support of the service, and therefore, don't personally have a dog in the fight at this point. I've pulled my radio dibs effective this morning, and will wait to see how this thing shakes out. Not everyone broadcasting on Radio Mecha faces the same issue, but in some genres, staying clear of RIAA eviscerates the programming choices so badly, as to make it pointless to try to continue.

Personally, I hope that the terms for running Radio Mecha don't become prohibitive.

The March boycott is against purchasing music from an RIAA label, paulsc.

There were a couple of CDs on that Indie 100 list that I thought WERE RIAA recordings. Huh.

You have to ask the people who actually pay for it (of whom I am NOT one)

To clarify, I did contribute to the MeCha fund drive last year (Didn't I?) but I'm not one of the folk involved with paying LoudCity for the pipes. I don't think LoudCity would be able to charge us retroactively, which just means they would have to absorb the additional costs for 2006. Ouch for them, and increased possibility that they may have to just close down.

I was not planning on DJing for the next few days before the news, and I intend to wait and see what comes next. (Again, remember, this has not "officially" been made public; it's apparently leaked from copies of the decision given to 'participant parties' or whatever) There are 15-day and 60-day appeal windows; and Sound Exchange or its members (RIAA being 90%+) can make individual deals with webcasters for less than the 'official' rate - which the RIAA might do to look 'generous'. The plot is thickening.

Without the $500 monthly minimum (up from a $500 ANNUAL minimum), our 1-to-10-listeners-at-a-time webcasts would not be burdened by this much at all. (And with LoudCity logging us, we wouldn't have to pay for DJing NON-member music... but remember there are some non-RIAA labels who belong to Sound Exchange) But again, what happens to LoudCity?

And since the royalties are on a per-song basis, my first advice is: PLAY LONGER SONGS.

March is progrock month on radio mecha

lol

I noticed that Radio MeCha had a max of 10 listeners.

Using icecast on my residential Comcast cable modem account, I can serve up to 10 56k mono mp3 streams, and have done so. No one ever complained. The RIAA did not come knocking.

So if the issue is just technical, we can certainly get around that.

Also, afaik when I last looked into this a couple of years ago, the $500 minimum was alive and kicking. It's not new.