The Record Industry Wants to Hide Its Products

The record industry doesn’t want you to hear its music. It would like to hide artists jealously away in vaults, safely hidden from all the evil pirates who would steal the music from Internet radio outlets of all kinds. At least, that’s the only conclusion that I can come to after reading this on one of Wired’s blogs:

The new rates force webcasters to pay for each song streamed to each user, and increase over the next few years as follows:

2006: $0.0008 to stream one song to one listener
2007: $.0011
2008: $.0014
2009: $.0018
2010: $.0019

Those fees will add up quickly for larger webcasters; the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) calculates that, assuming that the average station plays 16 songs per hour, sites would have to pay “about 1.28 cents” per listener per hour using the 2006 rate, and would owe this retroactively, in addition to licensing fees going forward.  RAIN’s math indicates that the rate would render Internet radio unsustainable, or at the very least, more ad-laden than terrestrial radio—and that’s before the songwriters’ licenses are taken into account:

“Even adding in ancillary revenues from occasional video gateway ads, banner ads on the website, 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 in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues.”

The situation looks grim for webcasters large and small.  Even tiny sites would owe the minimum of $500 per channel per year, which could also have implications for webcasters who provide customized radio stations, since the CRB does not define whether those would each constitute a “channel” (whatever that is).  Webcasters have a 15-day period to ask the CRB to rehear arguments.

Which essentially could kill off the majority of Internet radio stations. Streaming music providers like Pandora will either cease to exist or become a tiered pay service with subscription rates for what are now free services along with increased fees for their “no advertising” services. Which is actually very close to saying that they will go out of business since most people are unlikely to pay even moderat fees for their Internet radio.

I’m not so opposed to fee based services, though. What I’m opposed to is both the anti-innovation stance that the record industry and its proxies continue to take against music delivered via the Internet and the obvious unfairness of requiring Internet streaming music services to pay a significantly higher effective royalty rate than their traditional radio rivals. It is typical record industry idiocy; not only is it self-defeating and arrogant in the extreme.

Read the excellent coverage of the topic and more links here.

Sometimes a Movie About Guys Wearing Skirts is Just a Movie About Guys Wearing Skirts. Or Something to That Effect.

Apparently, according to Drudge, people are already debating the political bent of the upcoming movie 300. Since I haven’t seen the movie yet, perhaps there is something to all the chatter. More likely though is that the wagging tongues are a reflection of the over-politicized time in which we live. Nothing can be put on screen that isn’t picked over for political leanings and nothing can be said without courting angry responses from one side of the aisle or the other.

C’mon. It’s a movie from a comic book version of a semi-mythical story that is likely much heavier on style than political depth and it looks like great fun. I plan to be there over the opening weekend to see the blood, guts, and strange men in skirts--and I promise I’ll try to see it without worrying over the politics of the thing.

Update: Dorkafork, who brings us this mighty debate between R2D2 and Chewie, also points to a post about an interview with Frank Miller.

Britney Goes Bonkers. Or, Perhaps, Merely Bonkers-er Than Before.

This isn’t so much a bad idea or something that I disagree with as it is an oddity that just caught my eye.

Britney Spears’ disturbed mental state may have worsened with reports of an attempted suicide and other bizarre behaviour while in rehab.

Tabloid newspapers have reported Spears as claiming to be “the Antichrist”, writing 666 on her shaved head, and running uncontrolled through the Promises Clinic in Malibu.

The News of the World reports that the singer narrowly escaped injury.

“Later that night she tried to kill herself [with a bedsheet],” a source told the newspaper. “Paramedics were called, but luckily she was unhurt.”

Sad, stupid, crazy little girl. She really isn’t competent to be a parent.

Explaining Away the Inexcusable

Jay Tea at Wizbang! explains away Ann Coulters idiotic attempt at a joke (I think it went something like this: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before--John Edwards walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘John Edwards is a faggot.”’ ), fawning a bit over her “schtick” while telling us that he really isn’t a fan. He tops it off by asserting that Coulter was really just trying to make a point--"So, in that context, what is Coulter trying to express? I’d say that we’re losing a fundamental right here—the right to be an asshole.”

Okay. I think it’s much more likely that she was just stirring things up again because that’s what she does. She aims to offend and often hits her mark.

Through most of her career, I was some measure of a fan. I enjoyed her writing, I liked that she was over the top, and I even smiled at some of the things that made others grimace. As the years go by, though, she has had to push well past a point where I think she’s a useful “bomb thrower” and has become more of a caricature of her old self--which is just a disappointing way of saying that I don’t think she has much new to bring to the debate even as an agitator.

And there’s no need to excuse her. She doesn’t speak for us, she wasn’t elected, and I have no personal sense of loyalty that would lead me to encourage others to be patient with her carefully cultivated Tourette Syndrome. I don’t like it from Al Franken, Michael Moore, the Dixie Chicks, or the late Molly Ivins, so why should I want it from one of our own? Dennis Miller is about as far out as I go on that limb anymore because “plainspoken” doesn’t have to equate to “asshole” or “belligerent” to get the point across.

And if her point is that we’re losing the right to be assholes, as Jay Tea asserts, then she’s wrong. I’m surrounded by assholes every day. I see them on the roads, I manage to control myself in their presence in the Costcos and Wal Marts of the nation, and I hear their Oscar acceptance speeches on the late night news. People have all the right in the world to be assholes, but no one has the obligation to provide them with a microphone to broadcast their views.

What Coulter said was stupid, mean, and not funny--and the people who insist that she didn’t actually say anything are just playing an immature grade-school game that ignores the very obvious intent of her words. No, she didn’t say “John Edwards is a faggot”, but the intent was clear enough to anyone who isn’t bent on making excuses for her.

We--that is, we of the right--can be aggressive and blunt in our arguments, and should be more often, but we don’t need to be jerks, we don’t need to spout unjustly mean and crass things to win the debate. When someone like Coulter is invited to speak at one of our big events, her actions reflect on all of us; when her actions aren’t a good reflection, our comments must reflect our disappointment.

Check out Michelle Malkin’s live report of Coulter’s speech.