Well, the good news is that VIP listeners hours are apparently not included in the amount that I owe to SoundExchange for the privilege of sharing Christmas music with the world. The bad news is I apparently will owe a total of (approximately) $5,367.04 to broadcast from January 1, 2006 through March 11, 2007. I had budgeted $4,000 to broadcast for until December 31, 2007, so obviously the budget for this hobby has been blown out of the water.
In 2006, my wife and I had two Internet radio stations, Christmas Music 24/7 and ShowBizRadio. The Christmas station gained in popularity throughout the year, but the Show Biz station never really took off (for which I am now thankful!). In 2007, we changed the Show Biz station to be a “personal” station, and added an Instrumental version of Christmas Music 24/7 to the lineup. Both Christmas stations would be listed in Apple’s iTunes Radio directory.
Even if the number of people listening to the Christmas stations stayed the same for the rest of 2007, I would owe a lot of money. But I believe it is realistic that both of the stations would be fairly popular. Let’s assume I get the exact same number of listeners for each station. So my numbers for the rest of 2007 will be double what they were for 2006. Plus the rate is higher in 2007. That means my total performance rights bill for January 1, 2006 until December 31, 2007 would be $18,183.12.
There is no way in the world that I can afford to pay that much money. Advertising on this web site via Google Adsense brought in around $20/day in December. VIP memberships brought in around $700 in all of 2006. I am very thankful for those people who became Live365 VIP members through the links on the web site. I could do the podcast again in 2007. It was very popular last year, peaking at #7 on the iTunes most popular podcast chart. But advertising on podcasts is around $5/1000 listeners. I’d need to have around 3 million downloads for that to work well.
The other suggestion has been to only play artists that give me a waiver. The waiver will be an agreement that says they will not go to Sound Exchange for royalties on their songs. Since I do play a fair number of independent artists, this might work. I’m going to start contacting some of the artists I played last year to see if they would be interested.
If anyone has any other ideas on how Christmas 24/7 can continue in 2007, I’d appreciate it. At this moment, it looks like the station will only be available to VIP members. I’ll keep looking into the situation, and let you know what is happening.
