Re: CARP passed- this sucks.

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

At 11:14 AM 6/24/2002, Richard Zvonar wrote:
>At 4:51 PM -0700 6/23/02, Kim Flint wrote:
>
>[a bunch of stuff that makes good sense from a capitalist perspective.]
>
>I'm going to bow out of this debate at this point because I think that 
>several of you have eloquently argued for my position, but in a nutshell:
>
>For many of us the Internet has promised to be a viable alternative to 
>the 
>entrenched corporate model of the music industry. An important part of 
>the 
>Do It Yourself (DIY) alternative is the dissemination of our music 
>through 
>on-line commerce, mp3 downloads, and streaming audio. A major component 
>of 
>promotion is the community of small Webcasters who are more interested in 
>the music than in the music business. While some of these people may be 
>the fools and incompetents that Kim suggests, I think that a lot of them 
>are simply enthusiasts or are deliberately small businesses for whom the 
>RIAA/CARP royalties will make the difference between continuing and not.

and I'm still not seeing how this whole CARP thing takes that away. All 
the 
possibilities of DIY are still there, and the internet still offers it. It 
seems to me it is even better now because musicians have another way to 
get 
paid for their work.

>When I ran the figures for a small "hobbyist" Web station with 100 
>listeners I found that the royalties could be in the neighborhood of 
>$10,000 per annum.

Again, you guys are not grasping the economics of the internet at all. One 
thing that never ever changes is that bandwidth is not free. If you had 
such a web station, the costs of just the bandwidth, equipment, and data 
center space to operate would be much higher than that $10k/year royalty. 
There is no way somebody is operating such a station as a "hobby" unless 
they are extremely wealthy. No matter what, that webcaster has to figure 
out how to make money out of this operation, or he is going "off the air" 
really fast.

So now they have to pay a royalty rate for the music as well? Fine, the 
cost is a little higher. But you already had high costs anyway. If you 
can't figure out how to make your station cover the costs of this royalty, 
for sure you couldn't figure out how to pay for the basic operating costs 
of the station in the first place.

kim



______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com