From SaveNetRadio: "The SaveNetRadio Campaign today expressed surprise and hope upon learning that SoundExchange has formally proposed that cable radio services pay royalties between 7.25% and 7.5% of their revenue to sound recording copyright owners and recording artists.

"This proposed rate, effective from 2008 to 2012, is virtually identical to rates endorsed by more than 140 cosponsors of the Internet Radio Equality Act, but rejected by SoundExchange and the Recording Industry Association of America.

"'Perhaps this agreement means that SoundExchange agrees that 7.5% of revenue is a fair rate; they just prefer that the rate not be legislated,' Jake Ward, a spokesperson for the SaveNetRadio campaign said.

"'The Internet radio industry has never asked for more than royalty parity and an opportunity to grow their businesses to the benefit of artists, consumers, and even record labels. Perhaps SoundExchange's agreement that cable radio should pay 7.5% of revenue is a precursor to an equivalent offer for Internet radio services. It is hard to imagine that recording industry interests would continue to reject Congressional legislation and webcasters' efforts to set fair royalty rates while simultaneously agreeing to the same standard for cable radio services.'

"The Internet Radio Equality Act -- H.R. 2060 and S. 1353 -- would vacate the March 2nd Copyright Royalty Board's decision and set a 2006-2010 royalty rate at a competitive level with royalties paid by cable and satellite radio services (7.5% of revenue.) The bill would also change the royalty rate-setting standard used in royalty arbitrations, so that the standard applied to webcasters would align with that applied to cable and satellite radio."

Read this entire press release online here. Printable .pdf version here.

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From WFMU's Beware of the Blog: "We are pleased to announce that WFMU's live streams are finally available on the iPhone. iPhone listeners can point their browsers at iphone.wfmu.org and listen to our live mp3 streams at either 128k or 32k and also choose from a selection of our archived content and podcasts.

"Based on our initial testing it will come as no surprise that tuning in over WiFi will get you the best results however we've also had reports of listeners with strong EDGE reception tuning in at 128k without issue...

"For the time being we are only offering a small subset of our archived content and podcasts on the iPhone but will be adding more content as time goes by...

"It's a bit ironic that the iPhone, a somewhat sophisticated piece of technology... still lacks the basic live radio functionality that was available on the Walkman back in the 80s and the transistor radio as far back as the 50s. It's safe to say that providing this kind of functionality has never been a technical issue for Apple but has probably been more of a business decision...

"We've been looking at all kinds of options to provide a live iPhone stream since the product launched in June...

"A month or so ago, Tversity, a New Jersey based software company, announced that they had figured out a way to stream to the  iPhone...

"After contacting Tversity we learned that they also have some products aimed at enterprise level clients and they do a lot of work providing media delivery solutions to various wireless carriers. Over time we've been able to do some minor tweaking with their product and we're very pleased with the results."

Read the entire article at WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

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