New Royalties Delayed!

In a bit of good news about the the whole internet radio thing, the Copyright Royalty Board has issued a two month extension on when the royalties are due, making the new date July 15. This is great for the people fighting to save net radio because now they will actually have some time to talk to Congress. The bill that was introduced in an effort to nullify the ruling was only introduced on the 26th of April. With the new royalties being scheduled to go into effect on May 15, that left very little time for action to take place. Hopefully, with the extra time, the groups lobbying for it will get a chance to show Congress just how important internet radio is. The kicker of it all is that there is no conceivable situation where these royalties will be beneficial to anyone. Sure, there might be an initial big check received, but the number of stations that would be forced to close would create a huge loss of recurring revenue in the future. As any business will tell you, recurring revenue is what you want. In addition, with such incredibly high fees, more people would be tempted to turn to illegals means to acquire music. Right now, you can use services like Pandora to find music that you enjoy, and other music similar to it. If that goes away, it is one more reason to grab a pirated copy a song. On the distribution side, if it is so costly to legally have an internet radio station, people will turn to sending out pirate signals. You would think that these reasons alone would be enough for the entire music industry to try to stop this from happening. Instead, they demonstrate their ignorance, and complete inability to see reality.