AfterDawn: News

According to Jupiter Research, within next 18 to 24 months, only real survivors in webcasting are going to be either talk or sports radios. Other webcasters will suffer, even that number of listeners is up and growing rapidly.

This is obviously due the recent royalty structure changes in webcasting, which has already forced several small webcasters out of the business. Another problem that increases the pain for webcasters is the fact that there aren't any independent "clearing houses" that would handle the royalty payments and licensing contracts. Instead, each radio station is now required to pay and deal directly with each record label separately or to use major record label-owned clearinghouse, SoundExchange.



Both, webcasters and record labels, have taken the royalty decision to court and want it to be changed -- obviously webcasters want smaller, percentage-based fee and meanwhile record labels complain that the royalty rates are too low.

Source: News.com

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 5 Sep 2002 14:40