Re: CARP passed- this sucks.

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

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.

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. That might be peanuts for a commercial operation, 
but if one wished to avoid commercial sponsorship it would really be 
too much. The alternative to paying the royalties is to obtain 
individual releases from all the artists to be Webcast, and this 
added burden of paperwork would probably cause a lot of marginal 
operations to shut down as well.

My position is that one of the prime virtues of the Web is its 
ability to support a large community of "marginal" on-line 
publishers. The sheer variety of obscure and diverse material that is 
made available through such a grass-roots system is to the benefit of 
all of us (enriching the "gene pool"). In contrast to this we have 
the "commercial" publishers who have to be concerned with the bottom 
line, with the resulting proliferation of ads and boiling down of 
programming to only the most popular material ("inbreeding").
-- 

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Richard Zvonar, PhD
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