Ari's Planet

The US government, via the copyright office, sets royalty rates for songs. That seems a bit dumb, why is the government determining rates between private parties, other than perhaps setting some fair maximum to avoid excessive restraints on trade (as in increasingly defunct usury laws)? The end result is that instead of artists (via their representatives) negotiating with broadcasters, we have artists petitioning the US government to set particular rates and broadcasters petitioning to have lower rates. Oops, did I say artists? I meant copyright holders, which can be different from the artists. Now it seems everyone is petitioning for lower rates since Sound Exchange, one of the agents for copyright owners, seems to have screwed up when it assumed its negotiating tactic of defect early (demand excessively high rates) has caused a situation in which its rewards are reduced, when a more cooperative strategy (work out a fair rate with Internet broadcasters) would have ensured higher profits. By the way, I never got into Pandora's music selection model, but found last.fm to at least give me a fighting chance of finding some good music--last.fm was limited though by stupid rules on which songs could get played and a limited matching algorithm. At any rate, I found, like many others, the Internet and fellow humans with large music selections far more useful for finding music matching my tastes than any store/radio/advert, with the exception of a few college radio DJs.

Pandora Could Be First Major Casualty of New Royalty Rates, Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired, August 18, 2008
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/pandora-could-b.html