Studio LineDear Friends of WJCU,
As you may or may not be aware, a final agreement was reached in October between the US Copyright board and Sound Exchange, the sole collective representative of recording artists in matters of recorded sound performance royalties for webcasting, including that by non-commercial broadcasters.
Under a previous interim agreement, WJCU paid a very reasonable annual fee to webcast our programming. Under the new agreement, however, things have taken an onerous turn. Effective immediately, all non-commercial broadcasters are required to pay both a fixed annual fee and a per-song fee of .02 cents per-listener connection to our stream! Based on this requirement, we expect the cost of licensing our web stream to increase by a factor of at least 10.
While that’s pretty rough on an all-volunteer station whose actual operating budget is now smaller than it was 5 years ago (before we even began streaming or maintaining a website) it didn’t seem to be an insurmountable obstacle.
But, unfortunately, the old adage “the Devil is in the details” applies with particular emphasis in our case. As it turns out, Sound Exchange demands to know not only how many copyrighted songs we are playing to how many people at any given moment, but also the title, artist, album and label information for every copyrighted song we play. Unfortunately, it now seems that the only workable short-term solution for meeting all the data logging requirements is to use a commercial streaming service that requires the SIMULTANEOUS transmission of all the artist and title data as part of a total webstream. And that would require that all music we play would have to be preloaded into our computerized playback system…a relatively simple thing for commercial broadcasters with tiny playlists and some fully-formatted college stations, but obviously not a practical matter with the eclectic mix of musical styles and source material our many volunteer broadcasters use in programming at WJCU.
So, it is with profound regret that we terminate our audio streams, effective Friday, December 29th, for an indefinite period. This decision is one we are forced to make because we cannot place the University at risk of litigation The only possible exception will be Blue Streak sports, since no copyrighted music is involved – but there are technical issues yet to be worked out with this as well.
We deeply regret this turn of events. Beside the immediate negative impact in terms of listener options, we believe that streaming is where the future of the radio lies. So we’re committed to finding a way back on the web as soon as possible.
And so we ask for your understanding, patience and support. We promise to keep you advised of developments, and will resume our streaming service as soon as humanly possible.
As always, thanks for listening to WJCU.
Mark Krieger
Director/General Manager
WJCU Radio
A Service of John Carroll University
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