|
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Journal, but a different 'ism 
| | One thing I've always liked about The Wall Street Journal is the quality of its journalism, which is reliably high. The paper's conservative slant has always been confined to the Opinion pages. Last week, when I saw a WSJ editorial that said Google wanted Net Neutrality to avoid paying "market rates" to phone and cable companies for being carried on the Net, I could dismiss the line as one side of a debate. But I don't expect to see the same kind of stuff in the main sections of the paper. |
| | For 26 years, a tiny Ohio radio station called WOXY dodged regulatory roadblocks by morphing from an old-school broadcaster into a Web-only radio station and then into an arm of an online CD store. |
| | So far so good. Then it goes, |
| | Now WOXY's nine lives may be running out. Last week, after years of artificially low royalty costs to encourage Internet radio's growth, the federal Copyright Royalty Board raised the royalty rates that Web radio stations must pay to play music. |
| | WTF?? "Artificially low royalty costs" is RIAA spin, and the RIAA has been hostile to Internet radio for the duration. Nobody who is actually in the Internet radio business would utter that phrase. And nobody, not even the RIAA, believes that past royalty rates of any size were meant to "encourage Internet radio's growth". |
| | Hey, AM and FM stations in the U.S. pay no royalties at all to performers, and never have. Is that because their growth has been "encouraged"? |
| | But new regulations have now reached the online stations. The Copyright Royalty Board increased the fee they are required to pay to music performers to 0.08 cent a song per listener, retroactive to 2006, on top of the fees they already pay to songwriters and composers. And that fee will increase each year, rising to 0.19 cent by 2010. |
| | What's more, small Webcasters like WOXY used to fall into a special category that paid royalties based on total revenue or expenses, not the number of songs they played. Now, they'll be held to the same rules as everyone else. |
| | Two problems with that last paragraph: 1) that "special category" is what allowed many music-playing U.S. radio stations to operate on the Net (which they would not have, if the RIAA had its way); and 2) that there is no certainty that the new higher rates (for everybody) will allow any Net station to exist at all in the U.S. — unless it plays royalty-free music, or no music at all. |
| | The penultimate paragraph begins, |
| | If the new royalty rules stick, record labels will get higher fees from online radio stations... |
| | Sure. But only from the survivors. If there are any. |
| | Credit where due: Vuahini Vara does a good job covering the burden these new royalties will place on Internet stations. But she makes a mistake by not unpacking the provenance of the royalties, or their likely consequence: destroying a whole marketplace. And that's a matter I would hope the Journal's opinionators, as well as its reporters, would take an interest in. It's one that should rankle every pro-market, anti-protectionist, anti-government-interference bone in their bodies. |
Quote du jour
| | As technologists, we have two choices: |
| | One is to provide the customer a better experience, the freedom to select what he wants, a differentiation based on service quality against a backdrop of abundance. |
| | The second is to create artificial scarcities around the things that are abundant, create new inconveniences for the customer, new lock-ins, new irritants. Irritants like Region Coding on DVDs. Lock-ins like we see in digital music. |
Amazing, Gracie
| | In USA Today Cathy Lynn Grossman says Americans get an 'F' in religion. She begins, Sixty percent of Americans can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married. |
| | The piece also has a religious literacy test. I got most of it right. Missed two sacraments, four commandments, and wtf George Bush meant with a reference to the "Jericho Road". |
Envying Utah
Copyright 2008 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
