Article Digital music gets hearing;D.C. .
This article is really very interesting. It deals with addressingstreaming music on the internet. In 2008 a body of lawmakers met in DCto discuss royalty fees and rates. More specifically the meeting wasgoing to talk about digital royalty fees and how they should be tackled.
Backin 2001 a similar committee was formed under the same pretenses. "howare we going to pay these artists for digitally distributed content."In 2001 this was extremely new and exciting technology. There was evenmore gray area then their is now and all they had were somepredictions. These predictions actually proved to be rather accurate.Both sides music publisher and the distributors of music came to theconclusion that they would not be able to determine where these feescame from. Only that the streaming music could remain free so long asthe company committed to paying for royalties in the future. Thestreaming music companies argued that streaming music was akin to theradio and that stipulations and guidelines had already been laid down.This was a solid argument but honestly not totally fair. The amount of revenue generated from a streaming radio website could be gigantic. Thousands of ads can be flashing and surveys could be popping up. The ease and accessibility of the internet to the radio is much larger now as well. Anyone sitting in their office can immediately plug into the internet and listen to streaming music all day.
Thearticle that i found said analysts strongly believed digitally streamedmusic would be the main source of revenue for musicians in the next5-10 years. Right now they are still unsure of how much revenuestreaming music is actually generating.