Tuesday, June 25

RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter It's very interesting that they built this on the Yahoo!/RIAA deal.



When I was still there (the final deal was signed after I left Yahoo!), I hated the price points and explained why they were too high. HOWEVER, I was trying to get concession points from the RIAA. Among those was that I, as Broadcast.com, didn't want percent-of-revenue pricing.



Why? Because it meant every "Tom , Dick, and Harry" webcaster could come in and undercut our pricing because we had revenue and they didn't. Broadcasters could run ads for free and try to make it up in other areas so they wouldn't have to pay royalties.



As an extension to that, I also wanted there to be an advantage to aggregators. If there was a charge per song, it's obvious lots of webcasters couldn't afford to stay in business on their own. THEREFORE, they would have to come to Broadcast.com to use our services because with our aggregate audience, if the price per song was reasonable, we could afford to pay the royalty AND get paid by the webradio stations needing to webcast.

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