Reality Radio » H.R. 848

Taking A Stand: Protecting Local Radio Stations

Reality Radio — Sun, 02 May 2010 19:58:42 +0000

HR 848 is effecting radio stations all across the country. Debbie Bush, Vice President and General Manager of WFIE in Indiana gives her take on how the passing of the Performance Royalty Tax will effect her station.Debbie Bush starts her article saying “There are a couple of bills in Congress that I would like to talk about. These bills could potentially kill our local radio stations.”

This bill is not only effecting Black Radio, but local radio stations across the country. Debbie goes on in her article to say that local broadcasters need to take a stand against the passing of this bill. She goes on to stress the importance of radio to the local community.

If this tax is put in place, the community events that listeners are able to enjoy for free will be no more. Help us save local radio! Write your congressman today!

Click here for Debbie Bush’s full article…

The Man Can’t Tax Our Music!

Reality Radio — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:03:45 +0000

For decades, record companies have been begging radio stations to play their music. Sometimes they do more than beg: Few sorts of scandal reappear as reliably in the music business as a payola scandal, in which agents of the labels are caught bribing broadcasters to air their wares. In the Internet age, the AM and FM dials aren’t as important to promoting music as they used to be, but they continue to play the preeminent role in the process. As Clive Davis, a dominant figure in the record industry since the ’60s, told USA Today just this month, “Radio is still the leading force of determining what songs and artists break through.”

Now the Recording Industry Association of America and a coalition of other industry groups are backing a bill, the Performance Rights Act, that would require those same stations to pay a new fee for the right to air those records. An industry that is infamously willing to pay for airplay apparently wants to charge for airplay too.

This isn’t the small tribute the stations have long paid to songwriters. The money will go instead to the performers and copyright owners. (Those are sometimes, but not always, the same thing.) It would essentially be an extension of a fee already paid by Internet, satellite, and cable radio stations—indeed, the industry’s basic argument for the measure is that it will close a “loophole” that has allowed traditional outlets to escape the payment. The musicFIRST Coalition, a lobby created two years ago to push for such a bill, has accused broadcasters opposed to the legislation of believing that “AM and FM music radio stations should continue to get special treatment, that AM and FM music radio stations do not have to play by the rules, and that AM and FM music radio stations should enjoy a competitive advantage over other music platforms.”

But it’s not as though this is an inexplicable inconsistency in the law. The disparity didn’t exist until 1995, when Congress passed the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act at the behest of the very forces that now decry the separate-and-unequal system that bill created. W. Jonathan Cardi, an assistant professor of law at the University of Kentucky, summarized the record industry’s argument for the act in a 2007 article for the Iowa Law Review:

without some ability to control the digital performance of their recordings, they would be less able to prevent infringements of their existing reproduction, distribution, and derivative work rights. The labels maintained, for example, that if online services could freely transmit recordings in any manner they pleased, such performances would facilitate the creation of infringing reproductions on users’ computer hard drives.

Click here to read the rest of this article…..

Courtesy of Reasononline/Jesse Walker

What is H.R. 848

Reality Radio — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:34:22 +0000

H.R. 848 or The Performance Royalty Rights Act can be summarized in the following:

Performance Rights Act – Amends federal copyright law to: (1) grant performers of sound recordings equal rights to compensation from terrestrial broadcasters; (2) establish a flat annual fee in lieu of payment of royalties for individual terrestrial broadcast stations with gross revenues of less than $1.25 million and for noncommercial, public broadcast stations,(3) grant an exemption from royalty payments for broadcasts of religious services and for incidental uses of musical sound recordings;and (4) grant terrestrial broadcast stations that make limited feature uses of sound recordings a per program license option. Click here to read the full text of the bill…

If this bill is allowed to pass, it will put Black Owned Radio out of business. Browse the site and see what you can do to help Cathy Hughes save Black Radio!