DI.FM is going down???
UNBELIEVABLE !!! Di.fm is currently the biggest and in my opinion the best radio station in the internet. I just noticed on their blog the following:
THE ISSUE:
In March the United States Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) made a decision on what the webcasting royalties should be going forward and dating back starting with 2006.
The new fees, making us owe literally more than *two million dollars* due July 15th, do not take any realistic business model of a service such as ours and most others on the web into account. The short story translation is that Digitally Imported the company already owes just for 2006 many many times more in royalty fees than all combined revenue generated. Imagine a picture similar to if for every $1 we earn before even any expenses, we actually owe about $5 in royalty fees.
To make an analogy, imagine there was a law passed on an ice cream tax, and the tax rate depended on the number of visitors visiting your store rather than how much ice cream the store sold. So imagine the tax does not care if ice cream buyers came just to hang out and get a little bit of icecream - all ice cream stands would go out of business except those who sell wholesale mega packs to a few visitors in places like Sams Club or Costco, or Walmart if it was willing to loose money just to get you into their store.
The CRB judges completely ignored independent webcasters such as us and our business models, and adopted only a very high per song performance fee, without any kind of a provision for a percentage of revenue.
Full post here
WTF is that? I can not believe that Di.fm can be shut down, 2 milion $$$... where the hell should they get this money from? And if it does happen where will all of us listen to our weekly State of Trance ? :( If you live in the US, there is a site that describes what you can do to help the Internet Radio - Savenetradio.org. The new laws will be in effect on July 15th, and i am going to US on July 7th - i will call the f#$%$ing representative on the very fist day i arrive there, so U.S. Representative Thomas Allen - be prepared for a looooong phone talk :)
May 10th, 2007 - 16:03
Many, that’s terrible.. Those guys have really no better work than to annoy those who do quality work!!! The stupid thing is that the internet community is much greater in numbers than those idiots, but we are spread all over… I wish we could just get into their offices and get them out of there!