 "Photo: Jordan Smothermon/The Daily Texan")
Non-commercial radio stations, like UT’s 91.7 KVRX, may face the prospect of going off the air if new legislation proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives gathers enough support.
The Performance Rights Act, introduced by U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan, would impose annual performance royalty fees and add content restrictions for both commercial and non-commercial radio stations, as well as require stations to submit daily song usage reports.
While this may be fine for commercial broadcasters who generate revenue from their sponsors, non-commercial stations, like those on college campuses, might have a hard time paying for the necessary equipment to record the required information, as well as pay the royalty fees, estimated to be between $500 and $1000.
More than 80 faculty, staff and student representatives from various high schools and universities across the country submitted letters to Congress on Sunday opposing the legislation.
“Particularly in the present economic times — as students, their families and educational institutions face sharply increasing fiscal pressures,” the letter said. “Now is not the time to impose new fees on our small stations principally to benefit foreign-owned recording labels.”
EMI, Sony Music and Universal Music, three of the four largest record labels, are based outside the U.S.
The Local Radio Freedom Act, a proposed counter-measure to the bill, gathered 14 new signatures on Wednesday, bringing the total number Congressional opposition to 214 — four short of a majority.
Cathy Rought, a spokeswoman for Radio Free Alliance, a coalition created to fight the performance tax legislation, said if Conyers’ bill were to pass, stations would have to build a system to account for every song they play, what time the song starts, how many times it is played and the number of people listening online. This would be a problem for disc jockeys at stations like KVRX, who often play songs from vinyls, CDs or iPods. The radio stations would be forced to devise new way to efficiently record this information.
“Stations would have to come up with the money to put these systems in place, taking away even more money in addition to the $500 to $1000 royalty fees,” Rought said. “That would put a pinch on an already tight budget.”
Kathy Lawrence, director of Texas Student Media, said that while the fees would be an extra burden for the already struggling medium of college radio, the passage of this bill would not be the end of KVRX.
“College radio has been the bastion of independent, free-thinking music done by students who don’t need a lot of resources to operate,” Lawrence said. “This would just be another impediment for us.”
Will Robedee, the general manager of Rice University’s KTRU radio station, said college radio typically does not play mainstream artists who are under contract by the record labels who would benefit from the legislation, instead preferring undiscovered or up-and-coming musicians.
“Those acts love to get exposure and are compensated by the fact that people are listening to their music,” Robedee said. “College radio is really the friend of the struggling artist. This bill would hurt the artist’s friend [and] could kill college stations.”
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