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RAIN GUEST ESSAY:
SIMSON IGNORING LABELS’ PLACE IN ROYALTY DEBATE “JUST DISHONEST”:
By Fred Wilhelms
Last week, RAIN ran a link to an op-ed piece (here) written by or for John Simson on the need for a terrestrial radio performance royalty (RAIN coverage here). The piece ran in the San Jose’s Mercury News and was clearly intended to get the locals enraged about terrestrial radio cheating artists so they would write to their Congressional representative, Zoe Lofgren, and tell her to support HR 4789, the bill that would create the royalty… In taking his passion for the well being of artists directly to the public, Mr. Simson apparently doesn’t feel it is necessary to let the public know that at least 50% of the revenues from a terrestrial performance royalty will go to the labels, and 90% of that money (based on current estimates of terrestrial radio playlists) will go to the four RIAA labels…Saying this legislation is all about starving artists without admitting where at least half the money goes is just dishonest…
To read Wilhelms’ entire essay, click here.

PUZZLING RESULTS IN COMSCORE ARBITRON RATINGS RELEASES: Recently, Arbitron apparently, without fanfare, posted three consecutive months’ worth of their comScore Arbitron Online Radio Ratings reports, with puzzling findings. According to the June 2008 report, “CBS Radio” — which, according to the press release, includes American Online’s AOL Radio Network — had a monthly cume of 1.88 million persons and an AQH of 206,217 persons. (This is for the Mon-Sun 6a-12m daypart.) In the May 2008 report, however, AOL Radio alone had a cume of 1.6 million and an AQH of 198,560, which suggests that either (A) CBS Radio has a tiny audience or (B) AOL Radio dipped precipitously when its XM Radio channel offerings disappeared. Meanwhile, as CBS Radio was in the process of leaping to the top spot, Clear Channel Online disappeared from both the May and June reports “due to the reclassification of their radio streaming activity.”

For charts from May and April, click here. Webcasters who do not participate in the comScore Arbitron report include such major names as Pandora, Last.fm, and most other broadcasters’ streaming initiatives.

COMSCORE ARBITRON: 0% OVERLAP BETWEEN WEBCAST AUDIENCES: The Arbitron reports continued their puzzling pattern of the “unduplicated” cume of their measured networks equaling the precise sum of those networks. This implies that not a single respondent in the study listened, for example, to both CBS and AOL, or to both AOL and LAUNCHcast.

RIAA’S SHERMAN: CENTS-BASED ROYALTY SYSTEM SHOULD BE REPLACED BY PERCENTAGE SYSTEM: During a panel at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting, RIAA President Cary Sherman is reported as saying, “The U.S. needs to embrace a percentage rate structure rather than cents-based system.” Just such a system is proposed in the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would set up a “percentage-of-revenue” rate structure (RAIN coverage here). For more, read PC Magazine’s coverage here.

LAST.FM EXPANDS MOBILE REACH: Users of the S60 mobile phone platform can now directly stream Last.fm content through a free application called Mobbler. The S60 platform runs on Nokia’s Symbian OS, a mobile phone operating system similar to Windows Mobile or Palm. Mobbler requires the 3rd edition of S60. For more, read Mobile Burn’s coverage here.

COPYRIGHT OFFICE EXTENDS SECTION 115 COMMENT DEADLINE: The Copyright Office has extended the comment deadline to August 28 for a hearing “to determine if the statutory royalty of Section 115, dealing with the creation of Digital Phonographic Deliveries (‘DPD’) is implicated by the RAM and buffer copies made by real-time streaming,” as David Oxenford reports. The implication of Section 115 covering RAM and buffer copies would be the potential of an additional royalty fee for webcasters (RAIN coverage here). The Copyright Office will hold a hearing on the matter on September 19, while replies to the comments are due on September 15. For more on why the deadline has been extended, read David Oxenford’s extensive coverage here.

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