Why Are You Now Being Charged A Music Royalty Fee Rate??

I am surprised that my digital communications legal case snapshot came to a climax already this week. I recently reported about the fact that digital streaming hasn’t been around that long in relation to other forms of communication such as newspapers, TV, radio, etc. and that new laws were being created as events unfold.

Honestly, I wasn’t completely in shock when I received a recent bill from a digital streaming service provider stating that my rates were going up. The bill gave a detailed description about how my bill would be going up approximately 6% due to a new royalty fee. So why is this new “Royalty fee” appearing now?? The statement said that I wasn’t charged in 2016 or in 2017. So why now?

A quick breakdown of the changes for you, in 1972 a law was passed by Congress that required radio stations to pay royalty fees to recording artists for music recorded after 1972. Royalties for music recorded pre 1972 was to be determined by the states individually. In 1995 as the age of digital streaming became mainstream a new law was put in place to protect recording artists. However, the law was rather vague and failed to address the previous law passed by Congress. A group called the “Turtles”  sued one of the digital streaming companies and eventually won. The service provider had to pay the group $99M. Other recording artists filed legal cases and won. As a result, the digital streaming service had to pay $210M in royalties. (Jacobson, 2016).

The “royalty fees” are now showing up on consumer’s statements, but why now? The reason is that this particular digital streaming service won an agreement right to play music as they normally do through 2017, after that a royalties agreement would be put in place effective until 2022. It would then have to be revisited by both parties at the end of the agreement. (Marks, 2018)

How do you feel about the new charge? As a consumer should you have to pay for their royalty fees?

 

References

Jacobson, E. (2016, December 29). Music Industry Cases To Watch In 2017. Retrieved February 10th, 2018, from http://www.forbes.com

Marks, S. (2018, February 12). SirusXM: A Success Story (So Why Are They Still Paying Below Market Royalty Rates to Music Creators??). Retrieved February 11th, 2018, from http://www.riaa.com