I Hate The Music Industry
It's one of those things that you hate, but you have no control over and in a way you know that they kinda have to do it to keep their pants on to compensate for dropped music sales since the digital music uprising. Still though, they come off as a little more than greedy with their definition of "performance" as well as the royalty rate hike for Internet based radio stations. You have to ask, "when will it be enough?" Will they eventually make it so you can't play music in your own home loud enough to where your neighbors can hear it as well? I'm fuzzy on the details, but I'm pretty sure it's already against their policies for a store owner to play music they have purchased for themselves through the store's sound system without paying the RIAA royalty fees per song performance. Click through for more.
Just in case, here's a quick definition of the RIAA [ZDNet]:
(Recording Industry Association of America, Washington, DC, www.riaa.com) A membership association of music recording companies. Its goal is to promote the record label industry and protect the rights of copyright owners. It was a major contributor to the SDMI digital distribution system. Spanning more than a half century, RIAA's Gold, Platinum, Multi-Platinum and Diamond awards for successful albums are coveted marks of achievements by musical artists. Exports outside the U.S. are not included in this certification process. The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) is the European affiliate to RIAA (www.ifpi.org).
The royalty hike is going to destroy free Internet radio stations and as I just read today, Pandora is one of those that will likely have to close up shop. Pandora is awesome - and the funny thing about all of it is that Pandora has caused me to buy at least 3 or 4 albums since I started listening to it a few months ago which is 3 or 4 more than I purchased in the 8 months before. They probably don't even consider that the Internet radio stations don't do anything other than spread interest in music to people. You hear something you like and you wanna know who the artist is and then you might even consider going to Amazon or iTunes and make a purchase. What's the big deal? They are being overly strict and technical forcing everybody to pay for every time they play a song owned by one of the RIAA protected labels - preposterous! If it were the 60's when people were more active and made more noise about things there would no doubt be massive protests to this sort of thing. Either that or ALL artists would immediately stop recording with their labels and start selling their music out on the street to people directly.
One solution for the Internet radio sites that I wouldn't be opposed to, especially for Pandora, is a flat memebership fee with some kind of cap. For example, being able to play x number of songs per month for y dollars. Then there could be different amounts of songs for different amounts of money. At least they they would be able to calculate out the money necessary for them to pay the royalty fees plus take in the income from their advertisements on the site making it a nice small business. If every body took a step in that direction, eventually the people wouldn't complain and they'd accept it as a decent solution.
[Gizmodo]
