I was at hearing representing community and campus radio, one of the few non-lawyers in the room. The witnesses presented by Canada's performance rights organization, SOCAN, are being questioned aggressively by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, CBC, CRIA, Apple, and others. The stakes are obviously quite high, as some form of Internet broadcasting may replace terrestrial broadcasting as WiFi bandwidth and availability continues to increase.
Under the current copyright fee structure, radio stations pay a set percentage of their budget to SOCAN for the right to broadcast music. The most significant change to fee structures that SOCAN is proposing is the addition of a minimum fee: anyone who streams music in Canada would be required to pay at least $200 a month.
While the minimum fee won’t be as crippling to small netcasters as similar fees in the United States, it will still drive a great number of them offline.
At the hearing I represent the entire community-oriented radio sector in Canada, which consists of over 140 radio stations. For the past thirty years, campus and community radio has been Canada's incubator for new and emerging musicians. Countless major label and independent artists first received exposure and support from community radio. But this role is endangered by the new minimum fees, and the hearing over the next two weeks will go a long way to determining whether or not small campus and community radio stations, and small music podcasters, will be able to broadcast their programming using the Internet.
Initially I found little logical basis for the charges proposed under Tariff 22. The minimum fee that SOCAN proposed was the same for everyone: small podcasters, campus radio, the CBC, gaming Web sites, and big commercial broadcasters like Standard and CHUM. However, I think SOCAN’s objective is to create an artificial minimum value for the music it represents. Internet streams and podcasts are much less expensive to produce and distribute than terrestrial radio. While I think of the new milieu as allowing more voices into the audio media space, SOCAN no doubt sees only the possibility of higher profits for commercial media as distribution costs fall.
SOCAN’s proposed minimum, $200 (or $90) a month, might not seem like much, but let’s put it in context. The station I work with, CHUO-FM in Ottawa, pays SOCAN 1.9% of gross annual operating costs of about $250,000, resulting in a fee of around $4750 a year. Under Tariff 22, and assuming reasonable Web site expenses, CHUO would pay the minimum fee, which would amount to $2400 a year, increasing total copyright fees to SOCAN by 50%. This seems clearly out of proportion with community radio’s use of music.
And CHUO is actually one of Canada's larger community radio stations. There are very many small campus and community stations in Canada that operate on a yearly budget of only a few thousand dollars. A small station with a $10,000 in annual expenses would pay $190 for terrestrial broadcasting rights, but $2400 a year for Internet broadcasting, a 1200% increase.
For any campus or community station, Internet broadcasting is not a matter of extending offerings or reaching a greater audience. They are simply following their existing audience as their listening habits change. Terrestrial radio listening has, for many years, been slowly declining in Canada. This has been an especially pronounced among youth, the principle listeners to community radio. I’ve had first hand experience with the change in university student listening habits in the past few years as they have moved away from FM radio and embraced the iPod and the PC.
If SOCAN’s fee is approved as is, the result will be the effective silencing of non-commercial Internet music broadcasting in Canada. Most community radio, and probably all music podcasters, will simply stop creating and sharing their programming online. This will mean less Canadian music generally, and much less emerging and alternative music, available not just to Canadians who want to hear it, but to a broader global audience.
]]>The first has been silence: active tech blogger Robert Scoble wrote that he was going to take the week off "in support of Kathy [Sierra]". I appreciate the sentiment, but as I posted in Scoble's comments, that is the exact opposite of what he and others should be doing. You don't respond to this sort of thing by shutting up. It's an indication of how disengaged some bloggers are from the political realities of the world that they think that silence is helpful. Usually you don't feed the trolls, but saying nothing, or saying less, is not an effective strategy in this case.
That's why it is so painful to hear that Kathy herself is now is writing about withdrawing from blogging, and is questioning whether she will continue to speak at conferences. I hope that she doesn't give up her voice in the face of this nastiness.
The second absurdity has been Tim O'Reilly's draft Blogger's Code of Conduct. Again, I appreciate the sentiment here, but if such a code had been in place two months ago, when the attacks on Kathy started, what difference would it have made? The vast bulk of bloggers and commenters present at least somewhat civil discourse. That is, they already adhere to the spirit of the Code. The few that don't, the trolls and the sock puppets, won't be following to any rules but their own.
Interest in the Blogger's Code has moved the discussion away from what I think is a more important issue: the vicious misogyny of the attacks on Kathy. The tech "culture" remains male-dominated in a way that many segments of Western society no longer are. That challenge isn't going to be solved by whipping up a set of rules, but we certainly need to start addressing it.
]]>I found out last week that at least one person I know thinks Web 2.0 is a new and better version of the Internet, just released. My smart but non-geek friend asked me if, in order to view "Web 2.0 sites" like del.icio.us and Flickr, he needed to download Firefox. Someone had told him Firefox was "the Web 2.0 browser." No, I said, any current browser should be okay, but my friend insisted that he wanted "all the new Web 2.0 features."
I was reminded of how America Online used to promote itself with new versions of its software in the 1990s -- "AOL 3.0! Now with new and better buttons!"
But as I told my friend, there is no new version of the Web. It's true that we're probably doing better with search, collaboration, and content sharing, but this is a continuation of 15 years several decades of work, an evolution rather than a revolution.
One of the ways we're solving these problems is by a greater emphasis on nurturing and drawing on collective knowledge. This is the basis for Google's more effective search technology, which ranks Web pages based on who links to them and in what ways. Sites like del.icio.us depend on individual sharing and classification of information, and then aggregate it to make it more useful. While this sort of participation is central to many new Web services, older dot.coms such as Amazon have been doing it for a long time.
I've heard these technologies called "social technology" or "social software." Bart Decrem, founder and former CEO of Flock, calls this the "Participatory Web." All of these terms are preferable to Web 2.0, which is being used in so many contexts -- design, marketing, coding -- that it has ended up not meaning much of anything.
]]>Some of my colleagues are a bit surprised by how little this new policy does. They, like me, see commercial radio as a failing medium. In terms of program quality, things are about as bad as they have ever been; most commercial radio is backward-looking, repetitive, and unadventurous. The music ecosystem -- that complex relationship among artists, labels, radio, and the audience -- also seems very fragile right now, with music sales in decline, fewer new musicians getting airplay, and sales of Canadian artists stagnant. And radio listenership is shrinking, especially among young people and teens, who value the flexibility of iPods and satellite radio.
But the new radio policy didn't try to address these things. There were no significant changes to Canadian Content requirements, no new regulations to encourage airplay of new artists, and the CRTC long ago abandoned efforts to try to make radio actually sound good. In a study also released last week, the Commission claimed that new technologies will have only a marginal impact on broadcasting for the next while.
Why the disconnect? One should realize that commercial radio's main measure of success isn't any of the challenges I just mentioned... it's profit. And on that count, radio has never been more successful, with a 24% increase in 2005 to an amazing $277 million. That's more than a 20% margin.
In our current climate of deregulation, it's the industry's perception of itself as successful that becomes the reality of policy, not what we, as listeners, know. In other words, if radio doesn't think it's broken, the CRTC won't try to fix it.
There may be another reason why the CRTC is reluctant to address the systemic challenges I outlined above: it doesn't know if it can.
As I mentioned above, new Canadian musicians have a lot of trouble getting radio airplay in Canada, and one of the big themes of the review process was how this could be fixed. Nearly everyone talked about it, and many people supported some new regs suggested by CIRAA, the organization that claims to represent new artists. Many were a bit surprised at the hearing when CIRAA disowned its proposed CANCON Pro formula, revealing that it would have actually lowered airplay of new music. After that, their new recommendation, a 33% "new music" quota, wasn't taken seriously.
There is also evidence that the benefits from the CRTC's most important content regulation, the once reliable Canadian Content requirements, are diminishing. The last increase in CanCon, from 30% to 35% in 1998, had less impact on sales of Canadian music than similar increases in the past. Raising CanCon, as many in the music industry had suggested, would have increased their revenue from copyright, but probably not their sales.
As I suggested to the Commission in my own submission, content regulations are becoming increasingly less effective tools, and direct funding for new media creation and Canadian content should be emphasized instead. In that vein, the CRTC replaced its confusing system of Canadian Talent Development, originally established to support Canadian music from radio revenues, with a better funded and more focused Canadian Content Development (CCD) policy.
It's well known that too much talent development funding ended up benefiting broadcasters, rather than artists. The new rules tighten things up a bit, and also recognize that commercial radio revenues should go to support new and non-commercial media, including community radio. The Commission failed to require specific levels for this, but it's a start.
As many have said this week, the new radio policy just tweaks the system, rather than presenting a needed vision for the future. My fear is that the decline in radio listenership might hit a tipping point and begin to accelerate quickly, perhaps when a technology like ubiquitous WiFi radio takes off. Not that I'll cry too many tears for Canadian commercial radio; it stopped being an important part of my life many years ago.
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