| July 1, 2002
(in special 4th of July Patriotic Red, White & blue links!) You have probably heard all
of the recent bad news about the new
Digital Perfromance Royalties ("DPR") and many
webcasts and streams being shut down because of it.
First, the reason that there have not
been many programming updates on Music Sojourn over the past
2-3 weeks is NOT related to this DPR issue, but is because
of a technical issue with a software upgrade that has caused
problems for us when making changes and updates to our web.
We are continuing our almost non-stop work on correcting
these problems, and we hope to be adding new content again
shortly!
I would like to assure you that, with
your continued support, Music
Sojourn will remain on the web as long as it is financially
possible for us to continue. In other words, we
don't plan on shutting down our streaming just because of
these new fees, though we will
have to raise several thousand dollars in order to pay
the fees which are
retroactive to 1998. We also have server charges
coming due very shortly, so we need
to raise roughly $5,000 by the end of July to cover the
balances that will be due.
We have been able to stay here over
the past four years largely because of
Members,
hopefully like you. If you have not yet
become a
member, we will need your support
if we are going to be able to continue offer our programs
and streams in the future.
Music Sojourn has made very
significant progress in LOWERING our costs over the last two
years in order to maintain both some amount of free content,
and Membership content
at VERY favorable levels. We are developing our system and
cost structure to be able to offer Members additional
content at the very basic Membership Level of only $24.00 -
and at this time, your Membership level does NOT expire or
need to be renewed - EVER! This is VERY different from the
MONTHLY subscription services being developed and offered by
many other sites and services - some of which would cost you
as much as our basic Membership Level EACH MONTH!
Unfortunately, some things will
probably change because of the DPR.
Some program producers may decide that this is all not worth
it and pull their programs from Music Sojourn. Some may be
considering Membership only Monthly Subscription systems,
and others have just stopped producing programs for
streaming altogether until they can see what else happens.
I would ask you, as a regular
listener, to email or write to the producers of your
favorite programs to ask them to keep their programs on
Music Sojourn. They need to know of your interest and
support for our system.
The new DPR
will also impact our STREAMS section.
We will have to eliminate some of our streams because of new
additional fees that we will have to pay to Live365 because
of the DPR. We
will maintain several of the larger and more used streams,
as long as
Membership support allows us to do
so, and we will consolidate other content from streams that
we have to shut down into them to give them even more
variety.
So please consider a
Membership with Music Sojourn at
whatever level you can offer. I will assure you that we will
use your subscription dollars wisely to survive this
additional financial burden, and continue to offer high
quality content at reasonable Member
rates. You can
easily join at our entry level for just $26.00 via PayPal
(or contribute any amount of your choosing, no matter how
small) and
do YOUR part to help ensure that we can continue
to be here.
SPECIAL THANKS to
those of you who have contributed directly by check or money
order! We realize that it is not as convenient to take
the time to print a form and put it in the mail, 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.
SPECIAL THANKS ALSO to
all of you listeners who have supported us in any way,
through
Memberships, or making
purchases through our affiliate links.
---------------
If you are still not quite
sure what this is all about, here's a good article on ZDNet
that summarizes it all pretty quickly:
"Save Internet Radio: Here's Why and
Here's How"
You can also visit:
Save Internet Radio.org
For more press coverage and articles of
interest, click here
You alone may
not be able to save all of Internet Radio, but you CAN
save Music Sojourn! Your
Membership to Music Sojourn, at whatever level
you can afford, can allow us to be able to pay the Royalty
bill when it comes due and continue to be here adding new
programs and music long after May 21.
-------------
Here's some additional info
from the previous announcements:
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 does not 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!
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.
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 |
