News
Volume 14, Issue 41
Published January 31st, 2007
Published January 31st, 2007
News Lead
A Threat To Your Stream
Counting pennies could cripple college radio Internet broadcasts
"On air right now I've got a guitarist named Dave Martone, out of Canada," Allar said on the phone last week. "He's not at all popular, but he was the number-one student guitarist at Berklee [College of Music] when he went to school there, and the guy is absolutely brilliant."
Allar's love for the genre makes it the kind of show with a very small but deeply loyal fan base. Like so many other college radio programmers, his is the music the market forgot. WCSB's Internet stream of the show expands the community a bit, but it's still tiny. Allar read a chart on the computer screen to see that about 30 listeners, all from the U.S., were tuned in online last Friday. He and all the other DJs at WCSB are volunteers, but even if they were in it for the money, the dollars would be too few to count. Or the counting might be more trouble than it's worth.
Therein lies the rub: an effort to put a price on the music - to ensure that the people who make it get their due - threatens the continuing viability of college radio's Internet streaming broadcast. The days of suburban listeners logging on to get a clear signal when the station's 1,000-watt broadcast signal is pocked with static may be numbered.
Allar and others in Cleveland's college radio community say new regulations governing the payment of royalties for digitally transmitted music - especially the required record-keeping, but also the cost - could drive them to pull the plug. For John Carroll University's WJCU, 88.7 FM, it has already proven too much: The station stopped its Internet broadcast at the end of December.
WCSB's newly elected general manager, Holly Whisman, says the same fate may await other college stations in town, depending on what results arise from an upcoming agreement between webcasters, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the U.S. Copyright office. An announcement of their new agreement is due in March.
The threat has been looming for years. Congress passed the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act in 1995, and then in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The first established that royalties are due for music transmitted digitally. The second began to set out the rules for payment.
In 2000, the RIAA filled the need for a collection agency by creating an unincorporated division that would broker the royalties. SoundExchange collects money from digital broadcasters - from Sirius and XM to tiny college radio stations. Willem Dicke, spokesperson for SoundExchange, says the organization may collect $100 million by the end of 2007, and that by the end of the decade, collections will run several times that. After collecting fees, they're supposed to pay the money to the musicians and their labels. Lately the organization has been trying to get musicians to register with SoundExchange so that it knows where to send the checks.
The complexity of figuring out who gets paid and how much, however, has created a record-keeping headache that Cleveland State University student media and web specialist Dan Lenhardt, the faculty advisor for WCSB, says doesn't recognize college radio's nonprofit, public service-oriented mission, or its volunteer-driven, shoestring reality.
"They didn't take into consideration the special nature of college radio stations," Lenhardt says.
Until October, college stations had been paying a blanket fee to cover royalties for their Internet stream ($500 for campuses of more than 10,000 students, $250 for those with less), plus $25 in lieu of record-keeping. Those costs are likely to go up with the new agreement, but the bigger deal may be the record-keeping. Existing rules for tracking what songs are played weren't enforced until recently, in part because no standard format for reporting had been established. But in October, SoundExchange completed a specific format and guidelines for reporting what music gets played. For eight sample weeks through the year, stations are required to provide 11 pieces of information about each song played. But college radio stations like WCSB, WRUW and WJCU have more than 100 volunteer programmers, many of them students who have shows only because they love the music and feel like they are promoting it.
To further compound the challenge, their libraries aren't all digitized. Indeed, the extensive and eclectic collections reach well back into the vinyl age, not only in time, but also in other cultures, with LP recordings of Slovenian and Hungarian polkas, Irish jigs and reels, ranchera, nortena, cumbia and other traditional Latin styles. For each of these, the DJ is asked to report the name of the song, songwriter, album, label, catalog number and six other bits of information.
As Dicke says, all that work is to pay the musicians $0.0007 - that's seven one-hundredths of one cent - for each time one of their songs is played.
"So what's that," Allar says, "12 or 13 plays before they get a penny?"
And SoundExchange doesn't pay anything until the band has racked up a bill of $10. So for Allar's obscure fusion bands, and many other artists played on the underground, ethnic and local music shows, a paycheck is a long way off.
"No matter how I report it, nobody I play is ever going to see a payment from SoundExchange," Allar says.
Or, as Whisman says, "How many times do we have to play the Dreadful Yawns before they see any money?"
For the record, 14,285 times.
Nonetheless, Dicke says the law is the law.
"The law does state for any copyrighted material that is available commercially and is publicly broadcast, the transmitting entity has to pay royalty. The reporting requirements are something people will have to get used to."
But the broadcasters think that by making college broadcasters track what they play and pay for it, SoundExchange is spiting the community, the musicians and their art, in the name of collecting tiny amounts of money, which the musicians are not likely to see.
"I think there should be an exemption for nonprofit and educational institutions," Whisman says. "WCSB has a lot of people who come from diverse backgrounds and musical traditions, doing their shows as volunteers every week. To be able to broadcast music around the world is a tremendous opportunity to present Cleveland to rest of the world in a positive light and share music of different cultures."
Meanwhile, Lenhardt is encouraging people to contact their congressional representatives to ask that the Copyright Office create different rules for educational and other small, nonprofit broadcasters.
"Ask them why there can't be some exception that acknowledges that college radio is not the same as Sirius or XM, or Windows Media or Napster," he said.
mgill@freetimes.com
