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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Apr 17, 2002 | Read the story:
Because Steve Marks has named the station I manage, KSDS-FM, Jazz 88 in San Diego, I feel compelled to reply. Mr. Marks did call me after the New York Times article was published, and it was Mr. Marks who estimated that KSDS's annual royalties under DMCA would be $51 per year. I told him that it was not the money that would prevent KSDS from continuing its webcast.
The reporting of up to 18 fields of information on each song is the most daunting aspect of the proposed rules for a college station like KSDS, which is not funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is not an NPR affiliate. (A side agreement was negotiated with the RIAA for CBP funded and NPR stations.) Our jazz library includes approximately 250,000 songs, many of them still on vinyl, and all available for airplay. To build a database of all these recordings containing all the required information would take at least a year and require additional staff.
KSDS operates with a staff of four full-time people. Our volunteer air staff can't be expected to manually enter all the required data for each song and still present a professional-sounding program.
Many local listeners availed themselves of the webcast to hear KSDS and we also enjoyed hearing from listeners around the world. One of our most frequent requests is for information on where to purchase the recordings heard on KSDS. We're happy to provide catalog numbers to help listeners find the music they are seeking. We believed we had a win-win situation with the recording artists and companies. The loss of the KSDS webcast is a lose-lose situation for the radio station, its listeners, and for the artists whose music will not be presented to a worldwide audience.
KSDS also complained to Mr. Marks that the DMCA's restrictions on playing more than two songs in row by the same artist would prevent the station from programming birthday salutes to artists, retrospectives of an artist's music, and profiles of various jazz and blues artists and composers. His answer was to just block those segments from the webcast. I would invite Mr. Marks to spend half of every day responding to e-mails from those Web listeners who want to know why they are excluded from these educational and informative programs.
There are few enough stations playing the honored 100-year history of jazz. Those that remain are primarily non-commercial educational stations at colleges and universities. It would be a shame to deny access to America's only indigenous musical art form to those who can only receive it via the World Wide Web.
-- Mary Woodworth, Station Manager, KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM, San Diego
The impending fees and regulations are indeed a very hard burden for radio stations such as the one I help operate.
WMBC is the radio station for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Currently, our broadcast options are Part 15 AM (covering only our campus) and Internet broadcast. We use Icecast for Internet broadcast, because the fees charged by RealNetworks are well beyond our budget. We are trying for low power FM, but that is a whole different argument.
It's important to realize that WMBC is completely non-profit. We can't have any advertising, and therefore don't have any "revenue." We get a (very) small amount of money from the university each year, and attempt to raise some money with our recording studio, and sometimes by putting on concerts with local bands.
We're also completely staffed by volunteers. College radio is difficult, because the people change every few years, and you're not always guaranteed to have a large bunch of really dedicated students. Forcing such a group of people to keep track of as much information as the impending measures will require (apparently 18 pieces of information per song!) is too heavy a burden for such a staff. Combined with the financial hit, it's too much. "Sure, we'd like to try to get more listeners, but we can't afford it." The bandwidth is provided by the university, but these fees would punish us if we tried to grow.
Finally, a large portion of the music played on our radio station is released by labels not affiliated with the RIAA. Does the RIAA expect us to pay them to play this music? That's completely unfair, but this question hasn't been answered anywhere. Even if for some reason this was expected, independent CDs wouldn't necessarily have all of the little categories to report that commercial, mainstream CDs do. Bar code? No.
To clarify, WMBC does pay a small fee for the right to broadcast (airwaves) artists. This is a flat fee, and organizations such as BMI require us to report a reasonable amount of information for three days out of each year, which they select. We would not have a problem with doing something like this for Web broadcasting. Obviously, independent radio stations want to see the artists they play succeed and be fairly compensated. But the current proposal is terribly unfair and shortsighted.
-- Ray Shaw
