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Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,
I’m writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.
In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.
Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541
Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends – the more petitioners we can get, the better.
Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I’m no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster’s business potential.
I hope you’ll take just a few minutes to sign our petition – it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.
As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.
-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)
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I have heard about this a lot lately. I listen to Live365 quite a bit and they play it every once in a while to make people aware. Fees that regular radio stations don’t have to pay. Basically just screwing over the little guy.
My Alexa is way down too. I have a weekly average under 40K on the site in my name and am probably going to crack 100K by the end of the month I’d imagine.
Good for you on the alexa. As long as I stay under 100 I am happy right now. It’s not going to be a real big issue until/unless my page rank increases.
You post too much for your PR to go down…lol
I actually expect you to be a 6, but I highly doubt it will go below a 5 ever with how much you update.
Same here. It’s been a five forever, but up until this spring I have never made any kind of concentrated effort to raise it at all. I never really had any reason to care, but now that a bit of cash is in the offing that changes things.
Dropped to 125K today. Things are going well. Should be under 100K within a week or 2 I think.
Good deal. The lower it gets the slower it goes down of course. It seemed to take forever to get under 100.