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The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit issued a decision last week rejecting all of the appeals of the decision by the Copyright Royalty Board (“CRB”) setting the rates that noninteractive webcasters pay to SoundExchange for the digital public performance of sound recordings in the period 2021-2025 (see our article here on the 2021 CRB decision).  As detailed below, the Court rejected appeals from three parties, two that argued that the rates were set too high for specific classes of webcasters, and one from SoundExchange itself which argued that the rates should have been even higher.

As a reminder, the CRB rates apply to all companies who provide a non-interactive, internet-delivered steam of programming which includes recorded music or other audio content, including broadcasters who simulcast their over-the-air programming on the internet.  Congress established the process of setting rates through hearings by the CRB so that noninteractive webcasters would have access to all recorded and publicly released audio recordings without having to individually negotiate with each copyright holder (see our article here about the CRB’s responsibilities).  Services pay these “statutory royalties” to SoundExchange, observe certain requirements that limit how often particular recordings are played so as to not make the services a substitute for buying recordings or listening to them through on-demand services (which pay higher royalties negotiated directly with the copyright holder), and report to SoundExchange what they play.  SoundExchange collects the royalties and uses the reports of what the services played to distribute the royalties they collect.  One-half of the royalties collected go to the performers on the sound recording, and one-half to the copyright holders of the recording, usually the record labels that own the copyrights for sound recordings.Continue Reading Court Rejects Appeals of Copyright Royalty Board Decision on 2021-2025 Webcasting Royalties

A new Chief Copyright Royalty Judge of the Copyright Royalty Board has just been named by the Librarian of Congress.  According to the Press Release announcing his appointment, David Shaw will fill that position after having previously served as an administrative law judge on the International Trade Commission for over 10 years.  There, he heard complex cases dealing with detailed financial matters – experience that sounds relevant to the kinds of cases he will be deciding on the CRB.  The Copyright Royalty Judges decide cases determining the marketplace value of music when  setting royalty rates, and that look at the relative value of programming when deciding the distribution of cable royalties to program copyright holders.  In addition to ITC experience, Shaw was a judge at the Social Security Administration and, according to his biography, worked in the General Counsel’s office at NPR early in his career.  With the appointment of this new Chief Judge, we thought that it would be worth looking at some of the specific areas in which the CRB makes decisions that affect media companies.

The CRB is principally charged with rates and distributions for copyrights governed by a “statutory licenses.”  A statutory license is created by Congress when it is believed that individual negotiations between copyright holders and copyright users would either be unduly complex so as to be almost unworkable or where an efficient market would not otherwise exist.  Essentially, the statutory license means that the copyright owner must license the work that they own – they cannot restrict its use – if the user pays the royalties set by law or established by the CRB and abides by the conditions for use set out in the law.  See our article here about music statutory licenses and our articles here and here on some of the issues with the TV statutory licenses.  The conditions of use are often carefully restricted so as to only cover very specific uses under the statutory license (see our article here on the conditions placed on the use of music under the statutory license for webcasting – the public performance right for sound recordings used by noninteractive services discussed below).Continue Reading New Copyright Royalty Board Chief Judge Named – Looking at the Issues Considered by the CRB of Importance to Media Companies

Last week, we discussed the controversy started by Neil Young removing his music from Spotify because of its carriage of Joe Rogan’s podcast.  In that article, we looked at the relationship between music royalties and the decision of Spotify and other music services to emphasize podcasts and other talk programming over music.  Today, we will look at how music rights and royalties impact decisions like those of Neil Young and other musicians who may have wanted to pull their music to support the protest over Rogan’s podcast.

At its most basic level, there is the question of how much the artists themselves stand to lose from the withdrawal of their music from a service like Spotify.  Young himself said that he would lose 60% of his streaming revenue from pulling his music, which one source estimated to be over $700,000.  Given the other streaming services that now exist, his music is still available and generating revenue on his catalog, though apparently less than the amount generated by Spotify.  The 60% number in and of itself is interesting as, while artists and other music representatives complain about the Spotify per song payouts (likely because they offer a free, ad-supported tier with lower payouts than those from subscription services), the wider variety of services offered by Spotify seem to bring in big numbers of listeners – likely including many who would not subscribe to a pay-music service. Thus, because of the sheer numbers of listeners, and assuming that Young is representative of other artists, Spotify is responsible for the majority of the streaming revenue that has allowed the music industry to enjoy in recent years some of their most profitable years ever.  Even with these banner payouts, as we noted in our article on the Spotify side of the equation, the music industry is still not satisfied, recently calling the payouts “appallingly low.”  More on that issue in an upcoming post on the discussions of a US broadcast radio sound recording performance royalty.
Continue Reading Spotify, Joe Rogan and Neil Young – Looking at the Rights and Royalty Issues Behind the Story (Part 2 – The Rights of the Artists to Pull Their Music)

The last two weeks have been filled with stories about Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other artists pulling their music from Spotify in protest of its carriage of the Joe Rogan podcast.  While the political statements made by these actions generate the news, there are rights and royalty issues behind the story that are worth exploring.  While Washington Post articles here and here touch on some of these issues, looking at them in more depth helps to explain the importance that Spotify places on podcasts and why it would be reluctant to pull a podcast that has so many listeners (reportedly over 10 million per episode), even if the podcast has content that may be objectionable.  The issues raised by this controversy are also tied into two other stories that made the news for broadcasters this last week – Congressional hearings on the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act and on a potential sound recording performance royalty on over-the-air radio – topics we will cover in subsequent articles.

Let’s first look at the question of why Spotify, which started as a music service, has pushed so hard into podcasting.  We will follow up with a discussion of the issues on the artist side of the equation in a second article.  Spotify reportedly paid more than a hundred million dollars for the rights to the Rogan podcast.  It has also invested heavily in other podcast companies – including buying podcast technology companies including Anchor and Megaphone, and podcast content aggregators including Gimlet and the Ringer.  Deals with celebrities for their podcasts include those with former President Obama for his podcast with Bruce Springsteen, as well as an announced content creation deal with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.  Why would a music service spend so heavily to get into spoken word programming?
Continue Reading Spotify, Joe Rogan and Neil Young – Looking at the Rights and Royalty Issues Behind the Story (Part 1 – Why Spotify Has Been Promoting More Podcasts)

The trade press in the last few days has been full of news about a letter of inquiry from two Congressmen to Spotify asking for details about Spotify’s promotional royalty rates where, in exchange for lowered royalties, songs to which these rates apply may be played more frequently, as Spotify factors in lower costs into its music selection algorithms.  The Congressional letter asks whether this promotional approach is already in operation, and if it will lead to a “race to the bottom” forcing lower royalties on artists, resulting in economic losses to these artists.  While the implication is that negotiation over royalty rates is a new phenomenon, in fact such negotiations are common in the digital music marketplace and, based on the way that Congress itself established the royalties for music services, they are inherent in that system.  In effect, this Congressional letter seems to be asking for Spotify to forego a private business transaction by which it lowers its costs of doing business through providing its business partners something that they want – more exposure for certain music.

Indeed, as we have written before, these negotiations over royalty rates are required to operate in the digital music marketplace.  Royalties paid to performers and record labels for the use of music by an interactive music service like Spotify are not set by governmental decision (there is no Copyright Royalty Board setting a default rate as there is for noninteractive music services – see our article here).  Instead, the rates are set by private business negotiations where there is a give-and-take between the parties over various considerations – including the promotional benefits when songs are featured on certain playlists provided by services like Spotify.  Certainly, there are counterweights to any downward pressure on all royalty rates, as listeners to an on-demand service like Spotify want to hear the hits.  So Spotify needs to pay for those hits to attract and retain its listeners.  In some cases, artists have determined that there is insufficient promotional value to the playing of their music on an interactive service and that no royalty would be enough to compensate them for perceived lost sales of their music when it is featured on an interactive service.  As we wrote here, these artists may deny an interactive service the use of all their music, or portions of their catalog.  In other cases, as in the instances that apparently gave rise to the Congressional letter, record companies or artists may feel that it is important that their music get exposure, so they will be willing to accept lower royalties in exchange for wider exposure to their music to consumers that such plays deliver.  In other cases, other promotional benefits may be given to the copyright holders for lower royalties (in fact, initially, the record companies received equity positions in Spotify, presumably to help convince them to make their music available at rates that Spotify thought it could afford).  Royalties in the interactive music marketplace are simply the result of a marketplace negotiation, as Congress intended when they adopted Section 114 of the Copyright Act providing for digital performance rights for sound recordings.
Continue Reading Congress Asks Spotify for Information About Promotional Royalty Rates – Is This Much Ado About the Way the Interactive Music Marketplace is Designed to Work?

We are waiting on the Copyright Royalty Board to release its decision setting the royalties that webcasters (including broadcasters who simulcast their over-the-air programming on the Internet) will pay to SoundExhange for the public performance of sound recordings in the period 2021 through the end of 2025.  As we wrote here, that decision would normally have been released in December but, as the trial to establish those rates was delayed by the pandemic and held virtually over the summer, the decision on rates could come as late as this April, though once effective it will be retroactive to all streaming that has occurred since January 1 of this year.  While we await the announcement of the new rates, as I’ve recently received several questions about the rules that apply to streaming under the statutory license, I thought that I would take a quick look at the “performance complement” and other rules that apply to companies that rely on this license.

Note that the rules set out below are slightly different for certain broadcasters, as the NAB in 2016 entered into agreements with Sony and Warner Music Groups to waive certain of the statutory requirements for broadcasters who stream their over-the-air signals on the Internet.  These agreements allow broadcasters to stream their normal over-the-air programming featuring music from these labels without having to observe all of the obligations set out below.  We summarized those waivers here, and hope that they will be further extended to cover the new royalty term.  Also, some big webcasters have negotiated relief from these requirements (see our article here).  But for those not subject to a waiver, let’s look at some of the rules that webcasters relying on the statutory license are to observe.
Continue Reading Looking at the Performance Complement and Other Rules that Apply to Webcasting Companies Relying on the Sound Recording Statutory License