Items tagged with ASCAP
Pandora has just won the current round in the ongoing struggle over royalty fees with ASCAP (one of the agencies that collects and distributes royalty payments for musicians), and ASCAP is deeply unhappy with the ruling. Judge Denise Cote presided over the case and ruled that Pandora did not have to pay ASCAP any more than the 1.85% royalty rate for songs it plays for the period ranging from 2011-2015. According to the Wall Street Journal, ASCAP was seeking a sizable increase in royalty rates, up to 2.5% for 2013 and 3% for 2014. It was a loss for ASCAP, to be sure, but Pandora was actually seeking to reduce its royalty rates down to 1.7%, which is what terrestrial radio station pay. “We...
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The lawsuits that the RIAA bring against illegal downloaders garner most of the attention paid to online music royalties, but suing grandmas and college kids is never really about the money; it's about discouraging many by suing a few. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, better known as ASCAP, took a more direct approach. They asked a court to establish a framework of payments to artists represented by ASCAP from three large online music services. A decision was recently handed down, and it's a doozy: AOL, Yahoo, and Real Networks might be on the hook for as much as $100 million dollars for offering ad-supported streaming music on their websites from as far back as 2002,...
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