Wired's indispensable digital-music maven Eliot Van Buskirk reports some good breaking news: Internet radio stations will not shut down this Sunday.
Before I started blogging, even before I created a hockey website, I wanted to have my own internet radio station. One of my friends was already doing that and I had been amassing song titles. Then, the recording industry lobbied for the Copyright Royalty Board to step in and end internet radio by hiking the price it had to pay per song streamed.
A ruling on March 2 from the Copyright Royalty Board, an arm of the Library of Congress, imposed strict new terms on the licensing of copyrighted songs for Internet broadcast that may doom even the best-run, best-funded webcasting operations.
We can thank the million that telephoned Congress for the reprieve.
The negotiations between SoundExchange and the webcasters now center on these rates -- and they're taking place, Westergren notes, "under the watchful eye of Congress." And that, he says, is the main news today. "The reason this deal is happening is because of congressional pressure, and congressional pressure is happening because of people calling in. Everybody needs to know that. A million people in the last three months have called Congress about this. And Congress has said, Look, if you don't solve this, we will. That's very explicit."
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