| February 23,
2002 The Copyright
office has finally released the fee schedule for
Webcasting Royalties that will impact us and everyone
else trying to legally stream music on the internet.
It is not good news. Please take a few minutes
to look at these articles linked here so you understand what
we are up against and why we will have to change things on
Music Sojourn:
These Royalties are on top of
the Thousands of Dollars we already pay for ASCAP, BMI and
SESAC artist performance Royalties.
We just don't get significant income from ads on the website
because running non mainstream programs like Echoes, FM
Odyssey or Celtic Currents just dosen't bring enough
visitors for the millions of page views required to generate
a few bucks from ads. The only way the site has been
able to meet expenses to date is from the few dedicated
listeners who have chosen to support us by becoming
Members. Unfortunately, the majority of
people who visit to listen to Echoes and the other programs
do not support us directly. Purchases through Amazon
and CDnow help a little, but we would have to have EACH
LISTENER purchase dozens of CDs PER MONTH to support us at a
level that we would need to afford just these royalty fees!
The bottom line for us
is that we may need to raise thousands of dollars just to
pay the RIAA Copyright Royalty for the streaming of Echoes
and the other shows to date, and then start paying an
additional royalty rate of possibly hundreds or more per
month in these fees at the current usage rates. Plus,
we will have to raise even more funds to develop systems to
track the details of song usage required by the new laws.
So, basically, we're going to
have to change things. The most reasonable solution is
to significantly reduce the amount of free content, and make
the remainder of the content available under our
Membership system.
There will still be a lot of
FREE programming on the site via the Live 365 MP3 stereo
streams, already available here (click here), but we also
wonder how long Live365 can survive under these terms.
We do think that we will be
able to survive serving a
Membership base, but ONLY IF we are successful with enrolling
enough new members to allow us to develop the tools and
systems necessary to operate. If not, then we won't
have any alternative but to close up and move on to more
boring jobs somewhere else.
There will be more
information about this posted on the web site in the coming
weeks, and please also check back to this page.
Please click here to support us directly and
become a Member!
SPECIAL THANKS to
those of you who have contributed directly by check or money
order! We realize that it is not as convenient, but it
provides us with an extra 6 - 16% that we would lose to the
3rd party (Amazon, PayPal) credit card processing costs!
For more information, click here.
Scott Ericson |
