Just in time for the Holidays.

Being business manager of my radio station means doing a lot of things, mostly paying bills. One of the most important expenses we have (aside from our Transmitter move project) is that of licensing. What licensing does is allows any recorded transmission from an artist to produce a royalty for said artist. For years, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI covered over-the-air transmissions for artists. That is, artists would be covered by these organizations, and radio stations would pay the licensing entities for transmitting music over their airwaves.  Webcasting has changed all of that.

WUVT, like any good radio station, offers a free webstream. Ours currently works on a java applet as well as an ogg.vorbis stream that can be put in several different media players. Seeing that there was a new way to make money, the gov’t decided to step in with webcasting. They designated SoundExchange as the official third party to collect internet royalties. SX is really an arm of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), but we’ll keep that under wraps. I doubt any congresspeople listen to Jay Reatard or other artists whose labels aren’t necessarily under the RIAA.

Back to the issue at hand: webcasting fees. Each year, every non-comm must produce $500 in minimum fees to webcast. I guess this makes sense, it’s as if you’re opening another station.  Then there’s another thing: “excess reporting”.  Stations are to report for two consecutive weeks for each quarter of 2008. Any month that sees listeners go over 186, 000 Aggregate Tuning Hours is charged .0018/excess hour. The ATH is determined by how many listeners are “tuned in” at a given time. If for instance two people are listening to “Electric Feel” by MGMT, that counts as two performances of the song. 185, 998 more ATHs are permitted.  This is the most confusing thing ever, because there’s a report fee and a webcast fee.  Regular licensing relies just on one blanket fee. It’s because electronic submissions are considered “perfect copies”. I’m not sure how a compressed mp3 represents a “perfect copy”.

SoundExchange needs to be reformed. Let non-comms do the one time fee, or let us go back to doing the opt out of reporting. Most of our artists aren’t on RIAA labels, and it’s just gouging from a series of stations who can’t afford it.