The Senate Commerce Committee has announced it will hold a full-committee hearing called "The Future of Radio," this Wednesday. No witnesses have yet been announced. According to the Committee web site, members "will assess the state of innovation and competition in the radio market." The Committee is chaired by Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and members include Ted Stevens (R-AK), John Kerry (D-MA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), John McCain (AZ) and Trent Lott (R-MS). Look to RAIN for further coverage.

From Sarah McBride in the Wall Street Journal: "In an era when commercial radio seems to be floundering, National Public Radio is hitting its stride. Some 25.5 million people tune into its programming each week, up from 13 million a decade ago. It has more than 800 member stations, up from 635 a decade ago. In some places, like Seattle, its 'Morning Edition' is consistently the most popular morning drive show on any radio station. It is expanding foreign coverage, winning more underwriting dollars, and forging into the digital age with online streams and podcasts.

"Much of this growth has occurred under Ken Stern [pictured], NPR's chief executive, who joined as executive vice president in 1999. But there are clouds on the horizon. The average listener is getting older each year. Member stations everywhere face more competition from all kinds of new media options that didn't exist a few years ago, like satellite radio...

"WSJ: Your audience growth is impressive, but the time each person spends listening to NPR each day is declining. What can you do to keep listeners tuned in longer?

"Mr. Stern: All media face a lot of challenges of keeping people focused on their products... The answer is better radio. If we do that, we're going to hold people... There are also multiple opportunities to engage with NPR and public-radio content on podcasts or listening online. There's an extremely high opportunity for people to engage with our content, in ways that aren't measured by the standard time-spent-listening category...

"WSJ: Next month, NPR will launch an expanded online music service to introduce people to new songs and artists. Won't that compete with stations that already offer strong online music services?

"Mr. Stern: NPR and public radio stations around the country are already huge tastemakers in the music area. The truth is, most of the content you can't find unless you're in the broadcast signal of these stations, or you happen to have to have some type of map that allows you to navigate the hundreds of Web sites of public radio. If we can draw together this huge American archive of content in the music area ... that's something very powerful. And we'll add more on top of it.

"WSJ: NPR is taking a strong position that the new Internet royalty rates for streamed music are too high. But some performers say they deserve higher fees. How do you answer them?

"Mr. Stern: NPR and public radio have always been very close with the artistic community. We really see ourselves as partners... It's always been our desire to see fair fees paid to performers for the value they derive.

"I actually haven't met a lot of those performers who are worried public radio is not paying enough. I've seen and met lots of performers on the way who are concerned that higher fees might drive NPR and public radio out of the Internet business. Because if that happens, and we have to cut back our service or stop serving the American public, that would be bad for audiences, and it would be worse for artists. NPR and public radio stations drive an enormous amount of awareness and sales for artists."

Wall Street Journal subscribers can read excerpts from the interview online here.

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From the New York Times: "How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million?

"The answer — which may be any, or none, of the above — is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.

"Other big media companies — including Time Warner, The Financial Times and The New York Times — are equally frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: the growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight...

"Of course, media companies have haggled with advertisers over audience numbers for decades... But the Internet has given publishers a new form of ammunition: raw server data with precise numbers of site visits and page views. This data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors, but it does give them ballpark figures that they say are far more accurate than the extrapolations drawn by ratings companies based on panel samplings...

"A main source of the discrepancies is over how to measure Internet use in the workplace. Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore both track the Web use of representative panels of people, and use those traffic patterns to extrapolate the total number of visitors to a Web site. But online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems."

Read this entire New York Times story online here.

From CBC (Canada): "Online music retailers now have another party lining up for a slice of the pricing pie, after the Copyright Board of Canada announced late Thursday the approval of a new tariff on downloaded music files.

"Proposed by SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, the new tariff allows the group to collect 3.1% on the sale of each song downloaded from sites like Apple's iTunes Music Store or the Canadian service Puretracks.

"The Thursday announcement is the first part of the board's decision in regard to the overall SOCAN Tariff 22 case. The board must also release its ruling on other elements of the tariff proposal, including on fees for internet radio music broadcasts [see here]...

"Out of the 99 cents a customer typically pays to download an average music track, more than half usually goes to the artist's record label.

"Other costs that must be factored into the price include, for instance, an existing tariff that is collected for music producers...

"Puretracks president and CEO Alistair Mitchell has said in interviews that for the past four years, his company has been putting money aside in anticipation of the SOCAN tariff being approved."

Read this entire story online here.

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