Are some songs cheaper?? Do you just buy a huge license and some company distributes all that money?
In: 1481
How much does it cost to broadcast a particular song one time? *Freebird* for example.
Radio stations are still around?!
We have an amazing pirate radio station in our town which has no ads and very little talking. No top 40 bullshit except maybe stuff from a while ago. Hip hop, electronica, reggae, soul, blues etc.
Like TV a lot of stations use Nielsen Soundscan and they basically buy per play at a contracted rate.
Fun Fact:
Radio general licenses are significantly cheaper than streaming licenses. But radio can also be streamed, the legal difference to streaming is that you cannot choose the song you want but only a radio station.
That is why when using free Spotify you can only shuffle play from your playlists and the playlists have to have a minimum number of songs on them. From a legal perspective, you create your own little streaming radio station.
This is at least how it works where I live, I’m not sure it works the same way everywhere in the world.
This may be just one subscription system among many but it’s the one I know about. A long time ago, you can apply and pay for a subscription service where every month they send you a CD of the genre of music for your radio station (or club or whatever you are DJing for). So if I owned a club and wanted to play country music I can get a monthly CD of the top 40 of country songs. Dance, alt rock, hip hop, contemporary Christian, whatever. It was called Promo Only and it was limited to industry professionals. Don’t even dare to try to pirate it. How dishonorable! Would you download a car?
There are 3 big companies that have agreements with thousands of copyright holders to license all of their copyrights collectively. These companies act and an intermediary between the radio stations and the copyright holders to facilitate the licensing without having to do thousands of contracts with thousands of copyright holders every time. They just have to do thousands of contracts with those thousands of copyright holders one time, and then they just use those contracts to back any contracts they form with the radio stations to license the music. The radio stations pay the intermediary, and thenvrhe intermediary pays the copyright holders accordingly. ASCAP is the one you’ve probably heard of before, even if you didn’t know what it was. And it is a bit more complicated than that. There’s some more legalese involved with the exact privileges and obligations of the intermediaries. Rules about access and pricing, differences between the not for profit and the for profit intermediaries. But essentially they are centralized organizations representing thousands (or probably millions) of copyrights altogether just because it’s pragmatic.
at lest when i was doing internet radio stuff you could get a collective license from ASCAP that was based on your listener-ship size. more people that listen the more you paid
Heart FM have a catalogue of about 6 songs.. 5 of them are Ed Sheeran and 1 Taylor Swift, I swear
My father in law used to be a radio broadcaster. He worked for many years here in Detroit….he only played what was given to him. Record labels and other organizations had the entire days playlist worked out. Occasionally they would play other songs per request but very rarely. He always wanted to do his own Jazz show where he could play his own music but it was only able to during the late night hours. This was all from around 1980-mid 2000s
Latest Answers