The US's Digital Music Association, which represents numerous American web radio stations and music streaming services, including big guys Yahoo! and AOL, have rejected the latest offer by online royalties body SoundExchange in the ongoing dispute over online music royalties.
As previously reported, SoundExchange successfully persuaded the US Copyright Royalty Board to increase the royalty rates for American online music services, but the owners of many of those services have said the new rates will put them out of business. While those online media types have yet to successfully challenge the new rates through the courts, they have won considerable support in political circles, which is why SoundExchange are continuing to negotiate with the webcasters, even though the new rates were meant to come into force last weekend. The latest negotiation from the royalty body was aimed at larger organisations and offered to cap the minimum fees payable per year to $50,000, oblivious to how many channels an web service might operate (the per channel minimum fee is $500, so it benefits anyone with more than ten channels). The concession would be conditional on certain commitments regarding reporting and stopped 'stream catching' piracy.
While one major webcaster, DiMA, had announced that it would sign up to that particular concession, the DMA, speaking for some of the other big guys, said that they did not consider it a good deal. Speaking for the trade body, Jonathan Potter told reporters the proposal was "a disappointing turn after what we thought had been a very productive roundtable. DiMA and our members are happy to cooperate on issues of common interest even if outside the scope of the CRB decision, but SoundExchange has demanded enforceable technology mandates that are unreasonable, unworkable and way off-topic. They seek to leverage this absurd fee to impose mandates that they have unsuccessfully sought elsewhere".