Internet radio — who pays for what we play?

Today two media stories came across my desk (OK, it was my computer screen) about internet radio.  The first story involves Krip Hop Radio — a show of music created and produced by people with disabilities.  You might say that’s a niche market, but it’s a niche that will attract listeners all over the world.  So they are taking it to the internet. Their audience will be made up of listeners from many different countries. That’s the beauty of the web — you can get quite a few listeners for a genre that might not be as popular as **shudder** mainstream pop.  Two percent of listeners doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you have a potential audience of two percent of computer owners throughout the world you are talking about a lot of ears. 

The second story is this one from the New York Times. And it concerns something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while.  Who collects royalties for broadcasting on the internet?  Our podcast of Celt in a Twist is also broadcast on an AM terrestrial station, CJVB, which pays money to SOCAN (that’s how the composers and authors are paid, SOCAN — or another society like ASCAP in the US — distributes their revenues to writers and composers based on reports on who was played when).  But we haven’t submitted a SOCAN report for the show in over a year, because SOCAN has not asked the station to collect information for that time period.  Obviously the artists we are playing are not being directly paid for the music we play on the show. 

But no one is complaining, because the audience for the music, our listeners, go out and buy CDs (or download the music) and the musicians get paid in actual currency and also in increased interest in their work. If we stopped playing their music (and we would if they asked us to) they would lose.  Because we are not talking about musicians who have huge masses of fans buying millions of CDs.  We play music you don’t regularly hear on terrestrial carriers (like AM and FM stations).  If we played Nickelback and Celine Dion we might make attract a larger audience **sigh** but our listeners would definitely miss out on much more interesting stuff.

Also, is the internet **in** Canada?  Or the US?  Our program is produced and broadcast in Canada, the server we load it to for the podcast is in the US, and the listeners might be in Germany or South Africa. The musicians come from all over the globe.

As well, who would pay?  Traditionally, the broadcasting station pays a percentage of their revenues to the rights society for the privilege of playing music.  We are not the broadcasters, but rather the producers. One might say our program is revenue neutral for us.  One might also say it actually costs us money.  We are not raking in the big bucks (or euros or yen) on the backs of the musicians we play.  We are promoting their work in the most entertaining manner we know because we think it’s important.   

This is something that will eventually have to be addressed.  The societies and the governing bodies (yeah, I’m talking to you, CRTC) are running behind the technology.  Downloads and file-sharing (legal and not) are everywhere.  Artists are uploading their music to MySpace, You Tube, and other services.  Should we be penalized because we are spreading the word about their work?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 11:02 am and is filed under Industry, Radio Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.