Manzullo Hails Agreement to Keep the Music Playing on the Internet
Washington,
Jul 8 -
Congressman Don Manzullo (R-IL) today congratulated the music industry and America’s webcasters for ending their 2-year dispute and agreeing to a new royalty rate structure that will allow more than 70 million Americans to continue enjoying music on the Internet.
The future of Internet radio on popular websites such as Pandora, AccuRadio, Live365 and others was threatened in March of 2007 when the federal Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) set new royalty rates for Internet radio stations that increased their costs as much as 1200 percent and threatened to put them all out of business.
Manzullo joined forces with Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA) in April of 2007 and introduced the Internet Radio Equality Act (HR 2060) to vacate the CRB decision and put Internet royalty rates at parity with satellite and cable radio. In addition, Manzullo joined his colleagues in 2008 and 2009 to pass the Webcaster Settlement Act to give the music industry and webcasters additional time to reach an agreement.
The agreement reached Tuesday allows the Internet radio companies to pay a lower per-song rate royalty or 25 percent of their revenue to the music industry. Pandora founder Tim Westergren, who worked with Manzullo on the legislation, said the new agreement will allow his company to continue streaming music online to more than 30 million listeners.
“The Internet has provided us with amazing opportunities to enjoy a wide variety of high-quality music and has given us access to many artists we would never hear on broadcast radio,” said Manzullo, whose favorite Pandora stations feature Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. “This agreement gives artists significant compensation for their music without while allowing webcasters to stay in business. And most importantly, it will keep the music playing on the Internet.”
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