Webcasting Royalties: Plus Ça Change...

Following up on a previous post on this subject: Tony Walker over at ABC Digital Futures notes the likely impending demise of one of the most innovative Webcasting projects of recent years: Pandora, the online radio station of the Music Genome Project. For the uninitiated: the MGP is a database of the specific traits of thousands of songs by a wide variety of artists, which enables it to suggest to users that if they like a specific song, they're also likely to enjoy a variety of songs from other albums and by other artists. On that basis, Pandora offers personalised Webcasting of tracks which the MGP identifies as similar to those tracks that a user has already said they like.

Pandora is likely to close down for good (it's already unavailable outside the US) because of the extortionary royalty regime imposed on commercial Webcasters by the US government on behalf of copyright holders. There's a long history to this battle between Webcasters and copyright holders, and Pandora isn't the first station to go (not likely to be the last) - in fact, I presented a conference paper about the early stages of this conflict in 2003 (finally published in print this year), and if anything, all that seems to have happened since then is that, exhausted by the mainstream recording industry's belligerence, Webcasters have gradually lost the will to fight for survival any longer.

All this is happening in spite of the clearly stated willingness of commercial Webcasters to pay royalties to copyright holders at reasonable rates, even though commercial free-to-air radio is exempt from paying royalties altogether (it's recognised under US law as providing a valuable promotional service to the recording industry - I fail to see why Webcasters don't fall into the exact same category...). Unfortunately, most industry associations (led by the widely despised RIAA) are well past the point of responding to rational argument - and as I note in the paper, never negotiated in good faith in the first place.

Given all this, you can't help but sympathise with the decision of many musicians, Webcasters, and fans to turn their back on the industry altogether and market, distribute, and access music through other channels, legal as well as illegal. Of course, such moves will only serve to further harden the stance of industry organisations, which in turn are likely to further alienate these groups, and so on. It's a death spiral from which the mainstream industry is likely to be able to escape only when it's no longer 'mainstream' - that is, when the independent, forward-thinking sector of the industry has grown substantial enough to effectively counterbalance the majors' influence on copyright regimes in the US and elsewhere. In spite of many bad news stories from major labels in recent years, the mainstream industry seems to retain substantial fighting funds to delay that moment - so we might be struck in the music industry version of Groundhog Day for some time to come...

Meanwhile, the likely loss of Pandora is a particularly sad event. There are a fair few Webcasters which are relatively dispensable, but Pandora's 'music genome' concept was genuinely innovative and - as its apparent popularity indicates - would have led a great number of users to discover new bands and artists to follow, I should think. Shutting down a significant tool for encouraging more music consumption - not a particularly smart move for an industry that's already habitually (and fulsomely) lamenting what a tough time it's having...

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