Last.fm Sitting Out Net Radio Day Of Silence
By Robert Andrews - Mon 25 Jun 2007 08:37 AM PST
Last.fm will not be participating in Tuesday’s internet radio Day Of Silence. Some members of the site have called on the new CBS acquisition to announce whether it would support independent webcasters such as SomaFM, who are switching off their streams Tuesday in protest at Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) rate hikes they say will cripple their future, particularly now that it is owned by a media group that also owns record labels. But co-founder and CEO Felix Miller wroteon the company blog that continuing to let Last.fm members play tracks online was always a “no-brainer”: “The only solution to this dilemma is commercial; make a commercial argument and see it through. It’s in no one’s interest to let online radio die. But people want to make money from their music. And we want to pay artists for the music we play. It’s only fair.”
For Last.fm, it amounts to this - its business model works and the CBS acquisition is proof of that. It’s spent five years courting labels and royalties societies for licensing deals legitimate, under UK regulation Miller suggested is at least as harsh as those proposed in the US: ”PPL (the UK’s Phonographic Performance Ltd) has proposed charges which are even higher than the rates being proposed in the US by CRB now. This continues to be a massive challenge for us, but it’s one we’ve been struggling with for years. We’ve racked our heads to come up with a business model that can survive and even grow under these difficult circumstances, and I believe we’re making progress.”
Posted in: Companies, CBS, CBS Interactive, Countries, UK & Europe, Legal, Regulatory, Music
