FOR RELEASE: November 12, 2009
CONTACT: Elise Brown /elise@drummerpr.com /215-990-6955
Three New Free Christmas Music Channels from radioio.com
To Launch Friday, November 13
Christmas Traditions, Country Christmas and Today’s Christmas
TAMPA, FLORIDA ? NOVEMBER 12, 2009: Internet radio pioneer radioio.com will launch three new, free online Christmas music channels devoted to classic, country and contemporary Christmas music on Friday, November 13.
- Christmas Traditions is radioio.com’s definitive selection of traditional Christmas carols and perennially popular Christmas songs. Featured artists include Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Lena Horne, Andy Williams and Dean Martin.
- Country Christmas is radioio.com’s pure country Christmas music station, featuring classic tracks alongside today’s most popular country holiday songs. Featured artists include Alan Jackson, Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift and Gene Autry.
- Today’s Christmas is radioio.com’s mix of new and traditional Christmas music, featuring many favorites and originals from contemporary rock, pop and R&B artists. Featured artists include Sting, Sheryl Crow, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Michael Bublé.
Christmas Traditions, Country Christmas and Today’s Christmas can be enjoyed for free or commercial-free any time at http://www.radioio.com, where new radioio.com mobile apps for BlackBerry and iPhone/iPhone Touch, along with a new desktop app, are now available.
Specializing in exceptional music streaming since 1998, radioio.com (“radio eye-oh,” for “Internet-only”) has a new website featuring new content and three new subscription options. radioio.com now features 52 basic and 20 new, interruption-free, 192K Audiophile music streams in multiple genres of Christian, Classical & Jazz, Country, Eclectic & Specialty, Electronic & Dance, Hip-Hop & Soul, Holiday, Latin & Tropical, Pop and Rock. radioio.com is also featured on iTunes and streaming media players.
To listen now, visit http://www.radioio.com. To follow radioio.com on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/radioiomusic.
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MEDIA CONTACT:
Elise Brown
Drummer PR, LLC
elise@drummerpr.com
215.990.6955
twitter.com/drummerpr |
Pay for play
Performers want radio stations to compensate them for airing their music
By JONATHAN TAKIFF
Philadelphia Daily News
August 25, 2009
takiffj@phillynews.com 215-854-5960
ON ONE SIDE, we have an entrenched and powerful industry, ominously suggesting that this new legislation will eliminate services, wreak hardship on the land, maybe even put folks out of business. On the other side, we find advocates for change arguing for a measure they view as lifesaving. And they're damning the old guard for using scare tactics, brute muscle and misuse of the public trust to unfairly defend the status quo.
No, we're not talking about health-care reform, but the fight over legislation that could finally see musical artists getting paid by radio for all the great performances we know and love so well.
Think Aretha Franklin really getting "Respect" or Joe Cocker more than getting by "With a Little Help From My Friends." Both are songs the singers didn't write but made into radio staples with their brilliant interpretations.
Paying the piper
"Songwriters and publishers are paid when their tunes are played on the radio, but none of the artists or musicians who bring the music to life receive even a penny," groused Nancy Sinatra in a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times. She was talking up the Performance Rights Act, a measure that would finally compensate performers and the owners of recording masters for radio play - a payment denied them since the dawning of recorded music.
With high-profile artists like U2's Bono, Patti LaBelle and Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan recently rallying for the cause, the measure has gotten "farther along in the congressional-bill process than any similar legislation that's ever addressed this issue before," noted Martin Machowsky, spokesman for the MusicFIRST Coalition of artists and labels promoting the measure.
That fact, in turn, has now sparked the all-powerful National Association of Broadcasters and major radio station groups to start blasting with both guns - even when their aim is wobbly - to kill the legislation.
"NAB has already lined up 240 members of the House for a resolution which would oppose any new royalty fee," tipped Tom Taylor, longtime radio-industry tracker and executive news editor of the Chicago-based www.radio-info.com
Fighting dirty?
How ugly has this fight gotten? In a lengthy complaint recently filed with the FCC and up for public comment, MusicFIRST offers some anecdotal evidence that unnamed broadcasters are blackballing unnamed artists who support the PRA, banning the talent from the airwaves.
MusicFIRST is specific, though, in complaining that Clear Channel - owner of six Philadelphia stations - has denied PRA supporters the right to make their case through paid radio commercials. "They did it without even hearing or reading the spot, just on the basis of who we are," said Machowsky. And when pressed, he offers that "not a single radio station in the entire country has agreed to run the commercial."
One could argue that broadcasters are expected to play fairer with the public airwaves, which they get to use for free, especially when the topic of debate concerns them. But broadcasters have found time to push their own side of this case, to the extreme.
In one of several anti-PRA commentaries aired on Radio One stations, group founder and chairman Cathy Hughes ominously warned that the performance royalties, if instituted, "would immediately put some black radio stations out of business and would severely cripple the others." Among its holdings, the black-controlled Radio One owns three stations in Philadelphia - WRNB 107.9 FM, WPHI-The Beat 100.3 FM and WPPZ Praise 103.9 FM.
Even more melodramatically, Hughes suggested the "slaughter has already begun," linking the House Judiciary Committee's recent approval of the legislation to the sale three days later of three African-American-owned (not by her) stations in Pittsburgh to the local Catholic diocese. "How many black songs would you guess the Catholic church is going to play?"
Rhetoric aside, documents on the FCC's Web site indicate that agreements to sell these three stations were signed almost three months before the bill came to a vote.
In another classic Hughes' spiel, the woman took off on bill sponsor and House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, a veteran, 80-year-old African-American congressman from Michigan, saying the bill is "the brainchild of the foreign-owned record industry" and that Conyers had "flatly refused" her request for "black ownership representation" at a hearing. Clearly, she should talk more with her richly compensated chief executive, Alfred Liggins. As reported by www.nationaljournal.com, Liggins refused to show up for a July 9 Judiciary Committee hearing on minority radio on the grounds "I'm not going to sit there and get beat up."
The same old song
Getting radio stations to pay for the entertainment value and audiences that recording artists summon up is hardly a new cause. Major pieces of legislation were introduced in the 1970s and 1990s to bring the United States into parity with broadcast performance royalties in place almost everywhere else in the world. (Only our fair-minded friends in Iran, North Korea, China and Rwanda join the U.S. in not paying up.)
Nancy's late dad, Frank Sinatra, was a big advocate, back in his day. While acknowledging he didn't need the dough, Frank argued the unfairness that other talented singers who'd sold millions of recordings were destitute. A similar argument was recently made by Duke Fakir, an original member of the Four Tops. "Many [aging] artists can't even pay their hospital bills," he noted, "yet their music is played all over the world."
Ironically, American artists can't get any of the royalty money being collected for them in foreign lands, because of the lack of reciprocity. If we're not giving it up for their artists, they're not gonna give it up for ours.
Thanks for the spins?
Broadcasters have long argued, and with merit, that airplay is the best promotion an artist could want, that it's like free advertising, burning tunes into the public consciousness, selling scads of copies and also bringing folks out to concerts. Some broadcasters have even insisted (or gone along with the ploy) that recording artists should be paying them for all those plugs – the illegal business practice known as "payola."
But that master plan is falling apart in today's digital age, "when people are more interested in just listening to music than owning it," argues Mike Roe, founder of the 60-channel Internet streaming service RadioIO. That explains, he figures, "why performers and owners of recording masters are now pushing so hard to find an alternate revenue stream."
You know that now broken-record story about decreasing album sales? Total numbers were off yet another 14 percent last year to 428.4 million units, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Even superstar acts like U2 or Jay Z that used to sell a million copies the first week their new album debuted are now thrilled to have an opening-week return in excess of 100,000 copies.
But it's also a bad time to be asking radio to be opening up its wallet. Like every other old-line media in this revolutionary and recessionary time, radio has suffered from a loss of audience, profit and "Mojo."
According to the NAB, industrywide radio-advertising revenues dropped to $16 billion last year, from $20 billion in 2006, and are expected to plunge this year to $14.5 billion.
And for the most dedicated music listeners, FM and AM are now passe. Their interest lies in their iPod, or in the deep and, in some cases, bottomless catalogs offered by customized music-streaming services like Pandora, music-subscription services like Sirius-XM and Rhapsody, plus the literally thousands of Internet radio stations and dozens of audio streams popping up on the high channels of cable- and satellite-TV service.
While few, if any, of these alternates are making money today, all (ironically) are paying "blanket" royalties to the performers, as well as to the songwriters they feature, as stipulated in the Digital Millienium Copyright Act and then hammered out by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board and a rights-representing organization called SoundExchange.
Oh, and guess who else is paying performance royalties for streaming on the Internet? Over-the-air broadcasters, when putting their channels on line. So far, it doesn't seem to be killing them.
The bottom line
U.S. radio stations paid about $450 million in songwriting and publishing royalties last year - roughly 3 1/2 to 4 percent of their revenues. What would the PRA, if passed, add to their expenses?
The bills under consideration in the House and Senate stipulate that the estimated 75 percent of U.S. stations that gross less than $1.5 million annually would pay "no more than $5,000 in performance royalties, and in many cases it would be a lot less than that," says Casey Rae-Hunter, another advocate who works with the Future of Music Coalition.
The fee structure for larger stations has been literally left up in the air, to be negotiated by involved parties.
Although the NAB warns that the performance-royalty rate could loom as large as 25 percent of a station's gross income - which definitely would bankrupt the industry - the standard for performance payments overseas varies "between 3 and 6 percent," said Machowsky.
As stipulated, the money would be apportioned with 45 percent going directly to the featured performer and 5 percent to the backing musicians on the recording date, without any intermediaries getting their notoriously sticky fingers on the transaction.
The remaining 50 percent goes to the owner of the recording master, usually the person or entity that funded the project.
Yes, the latter is often the record company, and yes, a couple of the biggies are foreign-owned.
But as Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan recently testified, more and more artists today fund and own their masters, and so would "doubly benefit" in the payout.
So which side are you on in this battle - the struggling stations or the struggling artists? |
