WebFree Music  

• Stations need to pay a $20 fee to the US copyright office and file an "Initial Notice of Digital Transmissions of Sound Recordings Under Statutory license". The form is available at http://www.loc.gov/copyright/licensing/notice.pdf . If you are streaming and have not done this, you should take a look at the copyright office comments on the topic.

• Programming restrictions.

  A. No interactivity. This becomes problematic if a listener makes a request and can expect to hear that song within a relatively short period of time.

  B. If you stream in house, you are restricted in the number of songs you can play from the same album/artist.
  Specifically... no more than 3 songs and no more than 2 in a row from a recording or no more than 4 songs and no more than 3 in a row from the same recording artist or set of sound recordings sold as a unit (box set).

  C. No advance notice of songs, except in an illustrative manner or in at an unspecified future time.

  D. Archived material also has restrictions, but I won't go into detail.

  E. Repeated programs are also restricted.

  F. Restrictions on ads that appear simultaneously with the copyrighted material. I thought D,E & F are probably not significant enough to this group to elaborate on at this point.

• . Presentation on the Web

  A. You can't cause the users browser to automatically be forwarded to another url .

  B. Where possible you must prevent users from recording your stream.

  C. Information concerning the recording, including the artist, title and album. Exemptions include third party servers and where the technology is not common in the marketplace.

• Fees. If the DMCA is upheld, broadcasters want to pay a fee of $0.0015 per music webcast listener hour. The RIAA is looking for $0.004 per streamed performance, or per song per listener. Don't ask me to explain how these are supposed to be calculated!

• Record Keeping. It is possible that you will need to file monthly reports which include title, artist, retail album title, label, catalog number, International Standard Recording Code, if available and feasible, date and time.