Rumours of death exaggerated [LWN.net]

Rumours of death exaggerated

Posted Mar 11, 2007 0:09 UTC (Sun) by dsearls (guest, #37174)
In reply to: Rumours of death exaggerated by pjm
Parent article: Internet Radio on Death Row (Linux Journal)

While any copyright holder can cut their own deal, the burden of "clearing rights" (a practice that employs buildings full of lawyers in Los Angeles, working mostly for the movie industry) on a song-for-song or rightsholder-for-rightsholder basis, is too high even for well-oiled radio operations to bear. This is why podcasters (at least in the U.S.) avoid all but the most independent music sources (such as Magnatunes). This even includes KCRW in Los Angeles. The station's popular weekday Morning Becomes Eclectic program is also podcast, sort of. Only two MBE programs in February and none in March were "podsafe" and made into podcasts. The fact that KCRW is a high-profile and well-connected institution in Los Angeles says much about the frictions involved in clearing rights on anything other than a blanket basis (such as the one provided by the CRB, expensive though it may be).

By the way, there is no guarantee that KCRW will continue to play music over the air, since the latest CRB ruling even killed what protections there were for noncommercial stations.

I think the best answer is to provide listeners with low-friction open source tools to log what they listen to, know what they're getting and voluntarily pay for that. In fact, we have taken on exactly that challenge both within ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center, and in the Public Media and Open Source working group that met at the Beyond Broadcast conference a couple weeks ago.

So some development efforts are afoot. Feel free to jump in and help out.

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Rumours of death exaggerated

Posted Mar 13, 2007 6:53 UTC (Tue) by jpick (guest, #29470) [Link]

In some ways, there's a silver lining to all this.

The younger generation is getting it's music from the Internet. They aren't listening to the radio.

The old-style record companies don't know what to do with their catalogs. They'll keep them off the internet.

The kids will never know that the old stuff exists. They'll naturally gravitate towards stuff they can acquire directly on the Internet. Many will even pay money directly to the musicians making the music!

The new-style labels know this, and are positioning themselves as services and artist communities, and they'll be able to harness the power of the internet. Artists will find that they can retain rights over their works, and relicense them in any manner which suits them.

The poor old records companies will be stuck with tonnes of recordings that few will know or even care about. Don't you feel sorry for them?