Al's Morning Meeting

The Los Angeles Times reports:

An estimated 72 million listeners each month tune in to Internet music programming from hobbyists, traditional radio broadcasters and Web companies such as Yahoo Inc., AccuRadio.com and Pandora.com, seeing them as an alternative to broadcast radio.

The board ruled that the current rate of 0.08 of a cent each time a song is played would more than double by 2010. For music sites run by tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, the board set a flat $500 annual fee per radio channel for a certain number of listening hours per month. [...]

"Unless we can find an alternative to paying the published rates, there's no feasible way we can continue," said Bill Goldsmith, who operates an online rock-music station called Radio Paradise in Paradise, Calif. He estimated that he would owe $650,000 in royalties under the new fee structure in 2007 -- 25 percent more than he expected to pull in this year from listener donations.

KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour called the ruling draconian. She said the station, one of the largest National Public Radio affiliates in Southern California, could owe more than $350,000 for 2006 and 2007.

The Radio and Internet Newsletter calculates that the costs of this decision would make Internet radio unprofitable:

Because a typical Internet radio station plays about 16 songs an hour, that's a royalty obligation in 2006 of about 1.28 cents per listener-hour.

In 2006, a well-run Internet radio station might have been able to sell two radio spots an hour at a $3 net CPM (cost-per-thousand), which would add up to .6 cents per listener-hour.

Even adding in ancillary revenues from occasional video gateway ads, banner ads on the Web site, and so forth, total revenues per listener-hour would only be in the 1.0 to 1.2 cents per listener-hour range.

That math suggests that the royalty rate decision -- for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! -- is in the [...] ballpark of 100 percent or more of total revenues.

The Times provides this background:

All broadcasters have to pay royalties to composers and publishers, but traditional radio broadcasters -- arguing that airtime is free promotion -- have long been exempted from paying royalties to artists and record labels whose songs they play on the air. Laws passed in the 1990s governing digital recordings, however, required Internet and satellite radio operators to pay those so-called performance fees.

Faced with increased royalty fees, Internet broadcasters in 2002 persuaded Congress to create an exemption that allowed small online radio operators to negotiate a lower fee based on a set 10 percent to 12 percent of their revenue, not on how many songs they broadcast. That guaranteed that Internet broadcasters would not have to pay more in fees than they collected in revenue.

In 2004, Congress created the Copyright Royalty Board, a three-judge panel under the auspices of the Library of Congress, to deal with such issues. Because that board established the new higher performance fees, lawmakers may be reluctant to step in this time.

The board's top judge said its guidelines allow it to consider only economic factors -- not issues such as educational opportunities at college radio stations and the increased diversity of music that Internet stations may provide.

The Rural Blog is tracking the story of how school athletic associations have been trying to stop anybody but the contracted event photographer from selling photographs online of state playoff games or wrestling tournaments.

Some states have required journalists and freelancers to sign agreements that they will not sell photographs online in order to get credentials.

Some media companies, such as The (Louisville, Ky.,) Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader, told the Kentucky High School Athletic Association to take a flying leap and still got their credentials.

The Rural Blog reports:

High-school athletic associations, which represent mainly public schools but in most if not all cases are not public agencies themselves, are increasingly adopting the policy as newspapers find a new market for sports photos on the Internet. The policy has been adopted in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, according to the Bulletin of the Iowa Newspaper Association.

Milwaukee-based Visual Image Photography is a contractor for the Iowa High School Athletic Association and the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association. VIP President Tom Hayes told Don Walker of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "If anybody is at a game and can post pictures and sell them, that would hurt our sales and therefore hurt our revenue source."

See the story from New Orleans where after the newspaper raised a stink, the athletic association reversed its restrictions.

Al's Morning Multimedia

The Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina took on the problem of traffic speeding by clocking and mapping thousands of drivers. The paper produced interactive maps to show readers the roads with the most speeders. The site includes video interviews and mapped fatalities in the area.

Losing Your Reputation Online

Maybe you have never heard of the Web site AutoAdmit, but if you were a law student, you might well have.

AutoAdmit is a social-networking site where law students kibitz about everything you would expect, including each other.

It may be harmless until potential employers go searching for background on applicants and find damaging chat about the applicant.

That is what The Washington Post found in a couple of cases involving top-flight students who now believe they were zinged by online scuttlebutt.

The threat of getting slimed online is large enough that there are Web sites like ReputationDefender, which promises:

First, we SEARCH. We scour the Internet to dig up every possible piece of information about you and present it in an interactive monthly report. You can view this report by e-mail or by logging into our site. This information is detailed in straightforward categories, including:

• Social networks (MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bebo, and more)
  

• Professional review Web sites

• Blogs

• Online news sources

• Photograph, video, and audio sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc.)
  

• Millions of additional sites on the "open Internet."

Then, for about $186 a year, the site promises to "destroy" or alter the online information about you that you don't approve of. Included in this promise are "online news sources." It is hard to see how they could make a promise to alter news content.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.