Porntone Creator Responds to Copyright Royalty Board

The response to Friday's decision by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has been overwhelming, from music fans and webcasters alike. And although I'm sure we won't see any official statements about it, I've heard that the major labels do not, in fact, want all webcasters to go out of business. It seems their lawyers may have done too good a number on the Copyright Royalty Board, and so they might have cause to call off their SoundExchange hounds and renegotiate online radio royalty rates back to a percentage of revenue (rather than the new flat fee that eclipses revenue completely in most cases).

DJ Vanya, the guy who makes pornographic ringtones for the aptly-named BowChica Mobile and webcasts a related Live365 channel, sent a response to my previous post on the topic that is typical of what the responses I've been hearing from smaller webcasters. I thought I'd repost it here:

"When Rolling Stone wrote about fluffertraX during the last Copyright Royalty wars, I wondered whether we were going to survive. We did thanks in part to the listeners, Live365, and media outlets like yours for seven years now. We won Best of Web Radio awards, appeared in other magazines like Blender and Wired and countless interviews. I even took the show on the road as DJ Vanya, spinning fluffertraX at parties, clubs and festivals.

"This SXSW may be our last party however. The Copyright Royalty Board just pushed out some incredibly destructive new rates (the last rates drove many thousand web radio shows offline) that will likely wipe out most web radio. This impacts everyone, with incredible favoritism shown to AM/FM stations. They may actually wipe out XM and Sirius with all the back-payments for 2006 web simulcasting owed. A wet dream scenario for AM/FM... Thank god I stayed with Live365, but I don't know how they will
afford this tab."

(As an aside, I interviewed some folks and wrote a news story about the new rates.)