A BBC Radio 4 report on the crisis facing the Internet radio industry in the U.S. which ran Sunday morning is now archived on the network's web site.

The report by BBC correspondent Andrew Bomford featured interview segments with RAIN publisher Kurt Hanson and Ultimate80s founder David Landis, as well as soundbites from several leading webcasts like RadioIO, 3WK and KPIG.com. The news piece centered on the struggle of small independent webcasters in America, facing almost certain bankruptcy when sound recording royalties are due.

"It's just basic mathematics. If you look at what's going to happen on October 20th when the retroactive fees become due, the total amount of money due is several times greater than the entire revenue of the whole industry," says John Ousby, business development manager at BBC Online, and formerly with Virgin Radio. "There's gonna be massive, massive fallout."

Speaking on behalf of copyright owners was Allison Wenham of the Association of Independent Music in the UK.

Wenham, who couldn't quite disguise the contempt in her voice, argued, "You tell me why small, poor, little Internet radio stations would think of starting a business -- where their 'content' if you like, the thing that they're going to build their radio station around, is music -- and why they make a wholesale assumption, that that should be free to air."

Listen to the report here.

...

... To answer Ms. Wenham's question, if we may, no webcaster we know made the assumption that the music would be free. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in 1998 -- and from that point, webcasters did indeed know (and accepted) that they would be liable for sound recording royalties (unlike traditional radio). Ms. Wenham seems intent, like her counterparts here in the US, on perpetuating the myth that webcasters are looking to be "subsidized," or for a "free ride" (see Hilary Rosen's comment regarding Beethoven.com here, and any of various arguments made by SoundExchange's John Simson). The fact remains that webcasters are willing to pay a fair percentage of their revenue (as they do to songwriter and publishing organizations) while they promote artists' and labels' music for free. Yes, webcasters might use music "to build their business," but with royalty fees totaling two to three times revenue, there's really no business there. -- PM ...

The text of RIAA Chairman Hilary Rosen's speech at last week's Plug.In convention in New York has been published on the RIAA website.

RAIN published quotes from Rosen's speech last week (here). Rosen made several controversial comments during the question-and-answer session (which is not transcribed on the RIAA site) which generated plenty of spirited reader feedback -- not the least of which was her inference that Beethoven.com's Kevin Shively "didn't want to pay for his music."

See the transcript of Rosen's address here.




This piece, by Politech's Declan McCullagh, is interesting in that shows that there seems to be some success in unifying members of the tech community to make leaders in Washington aware of the issues they face, and to educate them on what can often be complicated matters. Perhaps the Internet radio industry might glean some important ideas from how this organization and others like it operate.

From CNet News.com: "Gigi Sohn hopes that geeks have become so enraged by recent anti-piracy schemes that they'll finally want to fight back.

"The 40-year old lawyer, head of the Public Knowledge nonprofit group here, plans to recruit a ragtag band of technophiles and train them to become a corps of effective political activists on the Internet front...

"But e-mail campaigns are easily ignored, and transforming online ire into effective political action is hardly a trivial task. It means convincing apolitical geeks to register to vote, contact their members of Congress when needed, and, perhaps on occasion, even rally in the streets...

"'We want to build a database in the first six months of 100,000 people,' Sohn said in an interview. 'That's a very, very high goal, but that is our plan.'

"When a key vote on Capitol Hill is looming, the plan is that Public Knowledge can activate its network of activists who will lobby their own members of Congress."

Read Declan McCullagh's column in CNET News here.