Arrrrr! Shiver me timbers! Me tiny pirate hat be held on by elastic and staples, and if any of ye scurvy dawgs be laughin’ at it, ye better be ready to talk wit’ Davey Jones, ye bleedin’ cockroachers!
Yarrrrrr!
RIAA, through SoundExchange, is lying to webcasters
The RIAA and its goonsquad, SoundExchange, is working very hard to destroy internet radio, by forcing webcasters to pay royalties that will run from 60%-300% of their annual revenue. For context, satellite radio pays 5%-7%, and over-the-air broadcasters pay nothing.
Why is the RIAA trying so hard to destroy Internet Radio? I wrote in a Geek in Review a while ago:
Because the
RIAA (which is essentially the major labels) has spent a lot of time
and a lot of money building a monopoly with a few media conglomerates,
and it’s been very profitable for them all for decades.This effort to wipe out independent online radio has nothing to do with
protecting artists, and everything to do with protecting a status quo
that supports a very few top 40 acts at the expense of everyone else.
In their effort to protect their outdated business model and insanely
corrupt relationship with a few broadcasters, the RIAA is happy to
prevent their artists from having a magnificent way to reach potential
customers who will buy albums, merchandise, and concert tickets.
I am rather worked up about this because I believe it’s about choice.
The airwaves in the United States are supposedly
owned by the American people, and licensed out to broadcasters for use, but in practice, that’s not the way it works at all. In practice, the airwaves are owned by Clear Channel, and they work hand-in-hand with the big four record labels to limit our choice of music. It’s a great scam they’ve got going, and it’s been a very profitable system for all of them for a very long time.
For the rest of us, though, this system sucks. For guys like me who can’t stand top 40 music, who can’t stand the utter crap they play on KROQ these days, and who want some fucking variety in their music, we’re screwed . . .
. . .with the notable exception of Internet radio, where we have choices as diverse as Radio Paradise, WFMU, Groove Salad, and Indie Pop Rocks.
Indie webcasters like SomaFM have been working tirelessly with the Save Net Radio Coalition
to educate our representatives in congress so that legislation can be
passed which would make it possible for these indie broadcasters to
stay in business. The RIAA doesn’t like this, so they’re trying to fight it, but in a surprisingly competent move, Congress is forcing RIAA and its goonsquad SoundExchange to negotiate realistic and fair royalty rates with webcasters.
That brings us more or less up to today, where we discover that the RIAA is getting desperate, and doesn’t like that it can’t get its way simply by threatening a lot of people and paying off a lot of congressmen.
Rusty Hodge, the GM of SomaFM, has been in DC for a couple of months, working like crazy to save his business and an entire industry. He’s been blogging about his experiences, sharing the little victories and big frustrations during the fight.
The RIAA must be afraid of Rusty and everyone who is working to save internet radio, because they’ve now resorted to outright lying to webcasters, in their latest efforts to threaten and scare them:
RIAA has SoundExchange issue press release to try and trick congress
into thinking the royalty situation has been solved. Nice work guys.The reason many people are signing is because they fear lawsuits
from the RIAA. RIAA representatives have been calling webcasters and
telling them if they didn’t sign by Sep 15th, they would be operating
in violation of the law. That’s the only reason they signed. It’s like a Sporano’s episode.The only way that webcasters can escape the high royalty rates is by signing this current agreement and only
playing SX affiliated label music. This means less independent music,
and more big label music. Which is exactly what the RIAA wanted.
The press release Rusty is referring to is reprinted in his blog, but here’s the short version: 24 webcasters signed an agreement with SoundExchange that gives them slightly-better royalty rates now, but expires in three years, putting them right back where they are today. If SoundExchange can scare enough indie webcasters into signing this horrible agreement, the RIAA will be able to go to congress and tell them that they really don’t need to pass the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would permanently save internet radio by preventing the RIAA and SoundExchange from jacking up royalty rates so high, it would force indie webcasters out of business.
And this "deal" is actually a giant load of bullshit. According to Wired’s Listening Post:
However, the agreement only covers artists and labels who are
SoundExchange members. Webcasters who sign the agreement but still
want to play music from other bands would have to pay SoundExchange the
higher per-song rates originally specified
by the CRB for those songs, because that music is not part of the
deal. In essence, small webcasters who sign have an economic incentive
to avoid lesser-known music.
So that’s what this is all about: stopping lesser-known music from even having a chance at finding an audience. The RIAA’s major members — Universal, Warner, Sony BMG, and EMI — are trying to put indie webcasters out of business. They’re not working to protect artists. They’re working to protect their monopoly, and now they’re lying to do it.
conversations with junkmail
Junkmail: I was looking for a method to improve my size.
Me: What?
Junkmail: By size, I mean overall length and width of my penis.
Me: Oh, well thanks for clearing that up. Good luck with that.
(Junkmail text from actual spam. Unfortunately, no actual spammers were harmed in the creation of this post.)
it’s so fun to relate
When I finished up my work yesterday, I walked out into the living room to see how Nolan was doing. He was playing Warcraft (non-MMO version.)
"Hey," I said, "how was your day?"
"It was good," he said. He drove his little hero dude across the map, and rained furious death down upon some other player. The game announced that Nolan was GODLIKE.
"Nice 1" the vanquished foe said in the game’s chat, in a shocking display of good sportsmanship.
"Dude, you owned that guy," I said.
Nolan looked up at me and smiled. "Yeah, I’m doing well this match."
I watched him for a minute, not because I care all that much about the game, but because I’d been working since he got home from school, and I’d hardly seen him at all.
"Hey," he said, "the weirdest thing happened to me today!"
"Oh?" I said, "What’s that?"
"This girl came up to me and started talking to me about D&D, because of my shirt."
He was wearing the +20 Shirt of Smiting T-shirt I gave him last year.
"And she was all, ‘I used to play a dwarf, but now I play an elf, and I won’t play half orcs because they’re seriously ugly.’"
"Dude." I said.
"Yeah!" He said, "and she was hot!"
"Well," I said, "if you need a refresher course in D&D, you know where to find me."
"Thanks," he said.
WIL WHEATON dot NET: Version 1.5
If you’d like to read my most recent blog posts, head over to WIL WHEATON dot NET: In Exile, my backup blog at Typepad.
Hi there. WWdN is currently undergoing a redesign and some maintenance. If you’d like to know what the status of the redesign is, or see some of the older WWdN files, read this entry.
What in the wide world of sports is going on here?
Way back in September of last year, I attempted to upgrade Movable Type, the blogging software that powers WWdN. I also attempted to move a few thousand entries and hundreds of thousands of comments into a newly-created (and faster) MySQL database.
And, uh, I broke it.
Actually, I didn’t break it. Someone who left a comment broke it when they used a seemingly random string of characters to indicate a break in their comment. Unbeknownst to me and them, it was the same string of characters MT used to indicate the end of an entry and its associated comments. When MT was moving all the data into its new (did I mention faster?) database, it came to that string of characters, and said to itself, “Oh boy! I get to start a new entry now! Let’s see, what’s the TITLE of that entry?”
Look . . . look . . . look . . .
“Uh-oh, there’s no TITLE. I’d better look some more.”
Look . . . look . . . look . . .
“Yeah, it’s still not there. Well, I don’t know what the next entry is TITLEd, so I’m going to just barf all over the server now, and fail. I’m sure one of the Users I heard about in TRON will figure this out and fix it quickly. There’s no way my User, Wil, would stay in some backup blog for six months!”
Ha! Stupid smug software. I’ve been in Exile for nine months! Who’s laughing now, jerk? Who’s your daddy! Say my name, bitch! Yeah!
Uh. Sorry about that.
Off to Exile
I didn’t know how long it would take me to figure out the problem, fix it, and get back here to WWdN, so I set up a backup blog at Typepad, called WIL WHEATON dot NET: In Exile. I intended to hang out there for a couple of weeks while I worked on this blog, but I quickly discovered that WYSIWYG editor at Typepad is great, and since it did all the heavy lifting for me (formatting, marking up links and inserting and modifying images) I had much more time to just take creative ideas and put them into my blog. Around this time, I also got some new writing jobs that actually put money into my pocket and food on my table — jobs writing about poker for CardSquad, writing a column on classic gaming for the AV Club called The Games of our Lives, and editing the geek news at Suicide Girls. In my spare time, I played a lot of Texas Holdem Poker at Poker Stars (where I’m a member of Team PokerStars) and did things with my family. I had one of my first real “grown up” moments the day I realized that there really are only 24 hours in a day, and I had to choose very carefully how I wanted to spend them. You know what I didn’t want to spend them on? hand-coding html and tweaking software settings. It’s sad, and I’ll probably lose a 3d20 geek points for saying it, but those days are way, way behind me. After a day of making freelance deadlines, the last thing I’d want to do is try to repair and redesign my website, and since I was happy in Exile, it just wasn’t that important to me.
The database was eventually repaired, thanks to the efforts of Mike Pusateri and his co-worker Yoshi, who managed to scrape the entire blog for me, and put it into a MT-readable format as an Xmas gift, and the technical support staff at Six Apart, who figured out what the hell was wrong with my dabase in the first place. Repaired database in hand, I found myself with a delimma: return to the now-totally-outated and badly-in-need-of-a-redesign WWdN, or continue using Typepad? Mostly, it was Typepad’s awesome WYSIWYG editor that was keeping me in Exile, but there was also the redesign issue: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t come up with anything that I really liked.
A few weeks ago, the design problem was unexpectedly solved, when I wrote a series of posts in exile (part one, part two, part three) that helped me clear out a bunch of mental logjams. Seconds before I hit publish on the final one, the way I wanted the redesigned WWdN to look sprung into my mind fully-formed. I grabbed a piece of paper, sketched it out, scanned it, and e-mailed it to my friend, who is working on it at this very moment. I’ve found two great replacements for the WYSIWYG editor I loved so much: ecto, which is a desktop blogging application for Windows and Mac, and Performancing, which is a free Firefox extension that runs on just about any platform in the world, and is optimized for WheatonIX. (In fact, I composed and published this entry using Performancing. Yes, it’s that easy to use.)
So this post represents a bridge between WWdN, and WWdN 2: Electric Boogaloo. All the links you would see on the front page of the old WWdN are in this post, so if you’re new to WWdN you can explore some of the old (and massively outdated) sections.
WWdN will be re-launched very, very soon. Until then, you can use all the nifty information to explore what’s already here. You can also come over to WIL WHEATON dot NET: In Exile to find out where my mind is right now.
Thanks for stopping by.
Old WWdN Content
- If this is your first time here, you should read this.
- By popular demand, you can now see or hear me read from my books Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot! If you like what you hear, you may want to pick up a copy of Just A Geek: Teh Audiobook. Or not. Whatever. I’m not the boss of you.
- audio blog
- photo blog
- faq
- about
- gallery
- contact
- links
- store
- appearances
- Technorati Profile
Nifty WWdN 1.0 graphics: get them before they are retired!
My first two books
Did you read all the way down here? That’s awesome. Thanks! Everything else you want can be found in the archives, or behind your couch. Good luck.
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