Why There Is No Web Music

RUSH: I am getting e-mail questions, ‘Why all of a sudden, Rush, during the program…?’ this from people that listen to the program on our web stream and those of you who are watching on the Dittocam. ‘How come you’re playing these parodies during the breaks rather than all the music that used to play?’ I explained this. I explained this in great detail last week. The Copyright Review Board that determines the price, royalty price that you have to pay for playing tunes on the Internet has just come out with retroactive price increases, and essentially for us, it’s based on how many people you reach, It’s like .0008¢ times every listener, every time you play something. For us, a ballpark figure, that would be $4,000 every time we played a tune, which is why these things don’t show up on the podcasts — unless, of course, somebody screws up, which happened a couple weeks ago, which is good, because you got to hear whatever parody it was that snuck on there.

So anyway, a bunch of people are trying to re-petition the copyright, the royalty board here, the review board, in order to change that. This is crazy, because they’re going to slit their own throats. This is sort of like airlines raising prices so high that nobody flies. This is something that’s going to have to change, but after you add all this stuff up… You know, one day wouldn’t cost all that much, but if you do it every day, 250 broadcasts a year, for three hours, all those breaks in there would add up. It’s just silly. So in order to be legal (and we, of course, do not flout the law here the EIB Network), that’s why there’s no more music in the commercial breaks. I hope it changes at some point down the road.