A Tale of Two Press Releases - Who Is A Musician to Believe?

David Oxenford (an attorney representing small commercial webcasters and who SomaFM contributed funds to) writes in his blog:

Two press releases about the radio music royalty controversy were issued late last week from groups appealing to musicians - and they couldn't have been more different in tone.:
(excerpt)
FMC suggests that multiple tiers of licensing are necessary so that all kinds of webcasters can continue to exist (unlike the one size fits all scheme adopted by the Copyright Royalty Board). FMC urges SoundExchange and the webcasters to come to a settlement that will preserve webcasting while fairly compensating musicians.
...
By contrast, SoundExchange argues in its press release that some webcasters are acting in bad faith in arguing that the rates are too high - and are "engaged in a campaign of misinformation about the process, the decision itself, and the impact of the decision on the participants." The Press Release itself is subtitled "Suggests Some Webcasters Not Telling the Truth About the Royalty Process."
...
In other forums directed to musicians, SoundExchange President John Simson has posted a more detailed statement, arguing that the music industry is changing through the digital revolution, and that music is an important portion of most webcasting operations - points with which no webcaster can argue. But where there is an argument is the further claim made by SoundExchange in these postings - that Internet radio revenues have increased in recent years from $50 million to $500 million (implying that these revenues allow webcasters to pay the new royalties). That $500 million figure apparently came from a widely quoted report recently released by an analyst at JP Morgan. However, that analyst, John Blackledge, last Thursday stated at a Jupiter/Kagan Conference on Radio and Television Values and Finance that the actual revenues from Internet Radio were in the $50 to $100 million dollar range, not the $500 million dollar number that many press reports seized on.

Read the whole thing here.