Bryan D. Brown

So I had a post all ready to beg everyone and anyone who visits this blog - either on purpose or on accident - to call their congressional representatives and urge them to act before the July 15th deadline put services like Pandora, Live365, SomaFM, and other amazing web-based stations out of business. And when all hope seemed lost, Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired: Listening Post made the following announcement:

At today’s Congressional hearing about the new rates for online radio that would essentially destroy it (as readers of this blog already know), SoundExchange, which was scheduled to receive the new royalty payments on Monday morning (since the enforcement date falls on a Sunday), made a startling statement.

The SoundExchange executive [Jon Simson, executive director] promised — in front of Congress — that SoundExchange will not enforce the new royalty rates. Webcasters will stay online, as new rates are hammered out.

So what gave SoundExchange this change of heart? According to Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren (from the Wired article):

“This is a direct result of lobbying pressure, so if anyone thinks their call didn’t matter, it did. That’s why this is happening.”

I really hope that’s true. Lord knows, I had my doubts about Senator Feinstein. After I placed a call and sent an email to her office, I learned that the largest contributer to Sen. Feinstein’s campaign, according to the Center for Public Integrity, is “entertainment media”. That can’t be good.

I also learned that Feinstein’s former Chief of Staff, Mark Kadesh, has recently taken a position at the Music First Coalition, another RIAA-founded organization that will be seeking to raise royalty rates for terrestrial-based radio stations in the near future. That REALLY can’t be good.

Hopefully, this will by some time for congressional intervention. This is about the time I make some sarcastic comment about congress and the war in Iraq. Not today, folks… not today.