"The lack of a performance royalty for terrestrial radio airplay is a significant inequity and grossly unfair."

except for the fact that terrestrial radio airplay is not on demand, user dictated, and it actually drives sales and awareness...

tell me how many artists have been broken on pandora, versus how many artists have been broken on terrestrial radio...

Seriously? New Business Model... no one pays for music consumption but every one is allowed to profit from that consumption... Really?

How is something "On Demand" when your choices are controlled and limited? 

smh...

This legislation is very poorly thought out. If passed, most small broadcasters would simply stop streaming. Many lose money on it anyway. Large broadcasters like Clear Channel would put more pressure on the majors to sign a licensing deal and the indie's will become irrelevant in the eyes of Clear Channel overnight.

Plus this does nothing to stop the 70% licensing costs Pandora has to pay and cannot afford to continue paying.

And so why would a listener want to listen to a Clear Channel station online?

If an entity can't sell enough advertising to cover costs, then it's a shitty business.  Pandora is a shitty business model.  So is Rdio, Last.fm, Spotify and myriad other half-baked something for nothing internet businesses.

Why wouldn't they? Clear Channel is the second largest streaming company measured by Triton, second only to Pandora. Online listening is the future, plain and simple. Granted I would never listen to a Clear Channel station. Online or over the air. But people do. Fact of the matter is most people have no problem with the limited variety Clear Channel provides on their broadcast stations and the crap provided by EchoNest on their custom stations.

Really? That's an interesting thought. One could say if an artist can't make enough money selling music and performing concerts then they are a shitty artist. Yet no one does.

Pandora's business model actually makes a lot of sense. Radio has always been available for free and still is, making it a necessity for Pandora to be free in order to compete accordingly. Pandora has a very advanced algorithm behind it that has proven very effective at delivering people music they want to hear and introducing them to new artists. Unlike broadcast radio, they do not discriminate against independent artists. Everyone is on equal ground. Pandora offers people a link to buy music they hear and there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest they cannibalize downloads in any way. The exact opposite in fact. They have one of the most advanced methods of providing advertising and are in fact the second largest advertiser on mobile devices. Pandora has pushed their reach beyond that of any pureplay webcaster both in terms of devices supported and listeners. They pay royalties for all those listeners, something broadcast radio does not do. The only problem is those royalties are too high for the time being. I don't see in any way how Pandora has a shitty business model.

You can't just say every online internet service other than itunes is half-baked services with shitty business models and expect to be taken seriously. The internet is the future of radio, just as it is the future of TV and for that matter, gaming. If you don't offer it for free or at a reasonable price, people won't use the service. They will simply find another way of acquiring the content illegally, for free. That doesn't help anyone. If artists don't like the existing crop of major services available, then do something about it. Nurture the ones you do like or work along with the industry to craft new ones. Pointing fingers and denying them your latest single like Taylor Swift has done to Rhapsody only hurts everyone by weakening the value of services. In her case, simply anti-fan.

But by algorithmically playing music people like, this harms the music industry and artists. We make money on limiting people, not enabling them.

Exactly. Limiting and controlling content..

We agree at IMRadio.  That is why IMRadio.com is set up with a revenue-share model for artist compensation, rather than the age old royalty model which hasn't worked in our current digital age. The revenue-share model is designed to provide a larger percentage of the revenue stream into IMRadio, its partners, and its independent musicians’ pockets. 

I wouldn't mind if BOTH Pandora and the terrestrial radio industry went bankrupt.

The gov't has a vested interest in keeping terrestrial radio alive for nat'l security reasons. No one talks about that.

That was true at one point, but now Americans spend 12 hrs on the internet, 12 hrs watching tv, & only 6 hours listening to terrestrial radio. I imagine they'd get more millage out breaking into Twitter than breaking into terrestrial radio. But 90% of Americans have a cell phone now, which seems like the most effective way to get out a nat'l security alert.

http://4.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Screen-shot-2010-12-13-at-2.48.52-PM.png

But should national security trumps artist rights? Without music, is there really any need for a nation?

Some of you people don't understand that the royalty rates imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board are nothing more than protectionism for the dying industry known as terrestrial radio.  We do have the best government money can buy.  The bigwigs try to make sure that emerging technologies don't upset the apple cart of the old fart conglomerates.

Terrestrial radio doesn't have to pay royalties on the songs they play, unless of course you count the payola they accept from the record companies, I mean the "independent record promotion services".

That's definitely not true. The broadcast radio industry knows for a fact they are a dying one. They know their future is on the internet.

The parity problem is vastly more complex than simply Internet Radio vs Terrestrial Radio. It involves parity between Sound Recording and Underlying Song Works, it involves the value of scattershot broadcast cumes vs. the value of targeted individual play census,  of advertising supported media vs pay for play and territorial coverage vs. the addition of local content.

Westegren has a valid complaint,  in the context of his business model,  but the solutions requiring a fundamental retooling of the of competing media vehicles may become politically viable ponly through the creative destruction of their exisiting systems.

No political leader is going to vote against the broadcaster who provide the lifeblood to their re-election.

Westergren might use Pandora to help Nadler re-elected and he'll get the other's attention rather easily.

Funn Networks is planning to pay ten to twenty times more than Pandora and Spotify. So boo hoo on them.. How does funn plan on doing that? Simple- its a better business model fromw hat we have seen. Sound exchange and Library of Congress set royalty rates too low we all know that. Funn plans on busting those rates apart.