Internet radio sites push for lower royalties for artists

Austin American-Statesman:

Internet radio sites push for lower royalties for artists

"Satellite and cable radio stations pay royalties at a rate of less than 15 percent - far less than Internet sites - Kennedy said. Traditional AM/FM radio stations are exempt from paying royalties.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has sponsored one of the Internet radio bills, said the royalty fee schedule improperly imposes the highest rates on the newest forms of technology.

'We are allowing the royalty process to serve as a tax on technology and that is discrimination against innovation,' he said."

Lots of information in the full article, the above was just a brief quote.

San Francisco Music Tech Conference Video

I moderated a panel at the San Francisco Music Tech conference on a bunch of different streaming technology issues.

The plan was for this to be a discussion panel about where streaming technologies are going, and what can be taken advantage of now, and what's coming down the pipe soon. We can also talk about what is really needed, vs what "solutions" that the market is pushing right now.

You can't really see me in this video, only my hands in the left side of the frame!

Left to right:

John Richey - Wireless Music Delivery Expert, Apple (he's half out of the frame, sorrt).

Greg Ogonowski - VP of New Product Development, Orban

Tim Pozar - CEO, Late Night Software and former VP of Engineering, UnitedLayer

Chris Grigg - Head of Standards, Beatnick

Analog vs. Digital - or when CD transfers go wrong

Shelby Lynne has been getting a lot of good press the last couple months about her new album, "Just a Little Lovin'". It's a album of Dusty Springfield covers, and some of them are quite good. But much of the press she's getting is about the overall sound of the album. It was all recorded in Analog. In her blog (which is also a guest editorial in the Huffington Post, she writes:

My new album, Just A Little Lovin’ was made on a 2 inch tape machine. I demanded it. I like working with engineers and producers who love and appreciate tape. I love the sound, smell, and feel of tape. That's why I enlisted legendary record producer Phil Ramone and the brilliant recording engineer Al Schmitt.

I went online to check out the album on iTunes, and sure enough it did have a wonderful vintage sound to it. I bought a couple tracks off iTunes and ordered a CD copy from Amazon. I was disappointed after hearing so much good about this recording to discover that on the CD, as well as the iTunes and Amazon digital downloads, there are several places where the digital audio clips! For example, 3:03 into the first track, there is a nasty clipping in both channels. Again around 3:15. I confirmed it by looking at a AIFF rip of the CD (as well as the MP3) in a DAE and the clipping is as plain as can be. Hopefully the LP doesn't have the same problem (I just ordered it), but considering how this is considered a great audio release, and credited on the CD as mastered by Doug Sax, I'm shocked that he'd let the clipping go on the CD. (I'm betting that Sax didn't do the digital master, just the Analog master.) Here's an example of the clipping as view in Bias Peak: You can see right there in the middle the clipped peaks. Now overloading an analog deck can make for some pleasant sounding compression. But overloading digital sounds really nasty. The clipping is there in the CD, the 128k AAC from iTunes and in the 256kb MP3 from Amazon. They vinyl just arrived today, so I'll give it a listen soon and see if it has the same flaw. I hope it doesn't. But I'm really, really surprised that the CD and digital versions of this album were mastered so poorly. And I'm equally shocked at how many people are saying this is one of the best quality recordings they've ever heard giving the clipping problems.

iPhone streams updated for 2.0/3G

Until today, our iPhone/iPod Touch streams were only working on the current iPhones with the 1.x software. Now thanks to some testing by Mark Malone at Apple, we've updated our iPhone streams to work with the 2.0 software and the 3G iPhones coming out on Friday. So now our streams work on both old and new iPhones and iPod touches. While I haven't had a chance to test the 3G data network with a new iPhone, you should be able to use the WiFi streams when you're on the ATT 3G network. I'll be interested to see how it works out!