RIAA’s new royalty rates will kill online radio!!

March 6th, 2007 by in Uncategorized

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has recently released a revised fee schedule for internet radio. Left unchanged, these rates will end internet radio, period. The RIAA has effectively convinced this federal committee to establish rates that make online radio a non-viable business.
It’s an utterly ridiculous ruling that renders any form of internet radio non-economic. We are continuing in the belief that sanity will return as everyone involved, including the 50 million avid online radio listeners, realize just how outrageous this is.
You can probably tell by this post that I feel strongly about this. Online radio has opened up a new world for musicians and listeners alike. It has brought millions of otherwise disconnected music-lovers back to music radio, and has opened up tremendous access and promotion for thousands of musicians – both obscure and well known.
We are striving very hard to build a business. We employ eleven full time people in our ad sales team, and despite very high licensing and streaming costs, believed that we could make it work over the next several years if internet advertising continues to grow. This ruling drives the licensing fees (fees that are NOT paid by terrestrial broadcasters) completely out of reach, and makes our goal impossible.
This is a terribly ill-conceived attempt to crush a powerful and positive grassroots movement that is sweeping across the music world. The record labels’ struggles have nothing to do with online radio and killing it will further hurt their business, not help it.
We need your help. If you’d like to get involved please write your congressperson. Below is a link to point you to the right person. If you can, please send a letter or a fax that asks for a reply (emails are too easily ignored).
Congressional Directory by Zip Code
If you want to learn more details, try this informative blog post from an attorney familiar with the process:
Now more than ever, thanks for your support.
Tim (Founder)

Pandora

The Pandora Team http://www.pandora.com/

297 thoughts on “RIAA’s new royalty rates will kill online radio!!”

  1. I sent a letter to both of my senators, my representative, and my governor. I recommend that everyone who uses any type of on-line radio service do the same. If enough voices are heard things can be changed.

  2. I’m guessing the only way to do this in Javascript would be to use the onresize event, and then using the resizeTo method to attempt to keep the window at the size you want?

  3. One more comment. Pandora is NOT legal for listeners outside the US. We can play music from anywhere, but can’t serve listeners that are not located in the US. It’s entirely a licensing issue. It’s the reason we require a US zip code at registration.

  4. No, we have not budgeted for this, nor have we known anything about this issue.
    If we would have known, especially the retro-active stuff, we would have never went into business in the first place.
    We are paying for our radio out of our own pockets every month, because we enjoy doing what we are doing.
    There is no way we can pay the fees they are asking for.
    What the RIAA is doing is OUTRAGOUS!

  5. I sent a letter to both of my senators, my representative, and my governor. I recommend that everyone who uses any type of on-line radio service do the same. If enough voices are heard things can be changed.

  9. It could have something top do with control. Control over hits and hypes. And with Pandora people could more and more discover, hopping from new song to new song, music completely unknown to them, guided by there own ears. It’s great, but too personal. You don’t sell records in large amounts this way when the people differ to much or when while listening experience developed, an active and curious ear.

  11. http://www.evdenevenakliyatx.com/
    It could have something top do with control. Control over hits and hypes. And with Pandora people could more and more discover, hopping from new song to new song, music completely unknown to them, guided by there own ears. It’s great, but too personal. You don’t sell records in large amounts this way when the people differ to much or when while listening experience developed, an active and curious ear.

  17. I must tell you that I am very happy. I can be at work working of course and relaying to the music at the same time. It is very relaxing and I am getting more work done because I am enjoying what I am listening too.

  18. I sent a letter to both of my senators, my representative, and my governor. I recommend that everyone who uses any type of on-line radio service do the same. If enough voices are heard things can be changed.

  19. The reason why the RIAA doesn’t care about things like Pandora is because Pandora and LastFM etc are taking over the industry. Without the need of the RIAA they’re losing a lot of money

  24. Adios Pandora- The music you played for each “artist selected station” was a peripheral obscure piece by them heavily mixed with crappy other work by borderline artists and their worst!!!
    It is VERY obvious that a “fish rots from the head” and the transparency of what you are doing, then ASKING for donations- how about a quality product oh that’s right if I cannot make a quality product lose my idealism and sell out- bye Pandora.

  26. Thank you so much for the article. Can I share that article on my website? If you allow, you can contact me via my e-mail address.
    Thank again…

  27. Thank you for a focused and informative post. I really appreciate the research and effort you put into this. So much of the marketing blogosphere is filled with feel-good balloon juice. This was a refreshing change. You can be sure that this blog has been added to my favorites.

  28. I must tell you that I am very happy. I can be at work working of course and relaying to the music at the same time. It is very relaxing and I am getting more work done because I am enjoying what I am listening too.

  29. I must tell you that I am very happy. I can be at work working of course and relaying to the music at the same time

  30. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has recently released a revised fee schedule for internet radio. Left unchanged, these rates will end internet radio, period. The RIAA has effectively convinced this federal committee to establish rates that make online radio a non-viable business.

  33. RIAA – they are all about greed and look what greed is doing to America today. Satellite radio is here to stay especially when the merger is ok’d. Pandora should just move to another country like Canada or to the Islands. The Riaa only care about themselves.

  34. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has recently released a revised fee schedule for internet radio. Left unchanged, these rates will end internet radio, period. The RIAA has effectively convinced this federal committee to establish rates that make online radio a non-viable business.

  36. I must tell you that I am very happy. I can be at work working of course and relaying to the music at the same time. It is very relaxing and I am getting more work done because I am enjoying what I am listening too.

  41. It’s a good idea to send RIAA a couple of links to some good internet radios (including this one!) and show this actually helps the music business. Big time.

  44. RIAA – they are all about greed and look what greed is doing to America today. Satellite radio is here to stay especially when the merger is ok’d. Pandora should just move to another country like Canada or to the Islands. The Riaa only care about themselves.

  45. I must tell you that I am very happy. I can be at work working of course and relaying to the music at the same time