 RAIN NEWS FLASH: NAB settles with SoundExchange on webcast royalties ·Feb 16, 04:51 PM STILL WAITING FOR DiMA, SCW, NONCOMM, RELIGIOUS DEALSSoundExchange and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) have reportedly reached an agreement on webcast royalties for commercial broadcasters’ simulcast and Internet-only online streams. The agreement, which applies to 2009-2015, requires broadcasters to pay a “per-performance” fee (a “performance” is one listener hearing one song) of $0.0015 beginning this year. The rate will increase annually to $0.0025 per performance by 2015.
Rates for the 2006-2010 term had already been determined by the Copyright Royalty Board in 2007. The new rates for 2009 and 2010 will save broadcasters around 16% compared to the CRB rates; however, the NAB did agree to roughly 10%/year price increases thereafter. By agreeing on rates through 2015, NAB members will not have to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees that would be required to participate in a Copyright Royalty Board rate determination proceeding for the 2011-2015 period. The NAB has apparently also reached agreements with record labels to waive certain statutory format restrictions — allowing, for example, their artists to be played more often than the restrictions contained in the DMCA. Those restrictions make it currently illegal to stream such programming features as “Triple-Play Thursdays” or “Album Sides Weekend.” As of press time, we’re still awaiting word of settlements between SoundExchange and various other webcaster groups, like the Small Commercial Webcasters group, religious broadcasters, Still to come, of course, later this year, is the battle in Congress to see whether broadcasters will be required to pay owners of sound recording copyrights for their use in over-the-air broadcasts. Check back later today or tomorrow for more news on webcast royalty settlements. share: del.icio.us.  Reddit  Digg  Yahoo  Wink  Windows  Google  Newsvine 
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and various DiMA members (e.g., Yahoo!, 
This is actually WORSE than the original deal, if you factor in what’s happened to the radio ad market, which is down 25% so far this year on top of a 10% slide last year. So X size audience nets way less revenue than it did when these rates were established – meaning that webcasters must pay a much bigger % of their revenue to the the labels than what was the original calculus, which virtually everyone who didn’t work at a record company believed made it impossible for streamers to make a profit.
A station with an AQH of 205,000 would pay in excess of $27 mil per year. By the time that station paid all of their other costs, there is virtually no way they could make a dime.
IF I were in radio I’d cancel my NAB subscription. They paid millions to lobby against the Sirius/XM merger which proved to be an embarrassing waste of time and money. Now they mortgage their only hope at survival by agreeing to a deal that nets out worse than the original one.
“Suicide Heard Here”.
— Bob Bellin · Feb 16, 08:19 PM · #
This deal will probably make streaming prohibitive except for the largest broadcasting companies. I do like some of the statutory waivers, though.
— ted chittenden · Feb 16, 08:40 PM · #