The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has announced its final determination of the rates and terms for use of copyrighted works by noncommercial educational (NCE, a/k/a “public”) broadcasters for 2013-2017. This wraps up the proceeding I’ve kept readers up to speed on through a couple of posts over the eight months. (You can check them out here and here.) The new rates and terms will be in effect from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2017.
So now all NCE broadcasters – small community stations, educational institutions and large scale public radio and television stations) – know exactly how much they’ll be paying to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC for the right to use the underlying music and lyrics in all songs included in their over-the-air broadcast programming for the next five years. (As I have previously mentioned, the new rates/terms technically also cover the use of pictorial, graphic and sculptural works, but the reality is that it’s all about the music.)
Important note: the CRB’s determination does not relate to the use of sound recordings for webcasting purposes. The current webcasting royalties, for both commercial and noncommercial webcasters, were set back in 2010, as I described in my post back then. (As to webcasting royalties, NCE stations should not forget that their annual reports, payments and (in some cases) elections will be due in January, 2013. Check back here for additional reminders on that score — although I’ll be sending out reminders to many of our clients starting next week.)
The proceedings leading up to the adoption of the 2013-2017 royalties could not have gone more smoothly (even though it did take almost two years to reach this point).
The CRB got the ball rolling back in January, 2011, when it opened the proceeding and invited all interested parties to join in. As the Copyright Act provides, copyright owners and NCE broadcasters and entities (e.g., NPR, PBS) can negotiate deals among themselves and the CRB can then rubberstamp those deals (subject to various procedural niceties designed to protect folks who might object to some or all of the deals’ terms).
Sure enough, essentially all of the relevant parties were able to get together and hammer out mutually agreeable arrangements, as I reported back in April (with respect to Non-PBS and Non-NPR stations) and June (with respect to PBS and NPR stations). The CRB has now formally accepted those deals, rejecting minimal objections from a few parties who were technically not even eligible to participate before the CRB.
As an overall matter, rates for the next five years will increase over those currently in effect – there’s a surprise – but not by much. The increase in every category tends to be no more than 2% over the corresponding rate from the previous five-year period. The precise dollar figures that will apply are set out in a number of tables and rule sections in the Federal Register. Since there are close to 200 separate data points, I’m not going to lay them all out here. I will, however, briefly summarize the factors that come into play in determining which of those figures applies to which types of NCE broadcaster.
Type of Station. First, as has historically been the case, royalty rate calculations will vary depending on the type of station in question. For these purposes there are three types of station: (a) NPR/PBS affiliates; (b) non-NPR radio stations affiliated with educational institutions; and (c) other NCE radio stations that are neither NPR affiliates nor licensed to an educational institution.
NPR/PBS stations. For NPR and PBS affiliates (including radio stations licensed to educational institutions), royalties will be based on how each individual piece of music is used. In particular, they will vary depending on whether the broadcast is (a) a network program or (b) the work of an individual affiliated station (with the latter costing less than the former), and also on whether the musical work in question appears (i) in a “featured presentation” or (ii) merely as background or theme music (again, with the latter costing less than the former). Rates for PBS and its affiliates will be greater than those for NPR and its affiliates. The same rates will apply regardless of whether the piece of music is licensed by ASCAP, BMI or SESAC.
Non-NPR radio stations affiliated with educational institutions. The most obvious change for this universe of stations is the elimination of the one-size-fits-all flat fee approach which has historically been used. Instead, 2013-2017 rates payable to ASCAP and BMI will involve a tiered system that takes into account the size of the educational institution’s student body. Different rates will apply to schools with (a) fewer than 1,000 full-time students; (b) 1,000-4,999; (c) 5,000-9,999; (d) 10,000-19,999; and (e) 20,000 or more. Stations with ERP of 100 watts or less will be entitled to the lowest rate (i.e., the rate for schools with fewer than 1,000 full-time students), regardless of the actual size of the school’s student body.
No such tiering will apply for SESAC music, however. Instead, this class of station will pay a flat annual fee of $140, with increases each year thereafter based on a cost of living coefficient equivalent to the greater of: (a) the change in the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index in the prior year or (b) 2%.
Other NCE radio stations. NCE stations not fitting into either of the two classes described above will, as expected, pay flat annual rates, but the rates will vary based on: (a) the size of the population within each station’s 60 dBu contour (along with any additional population provided by translators or boosters); (b) the nature of the station’s programming; and (c) whether the music is licensed by ASCAP/BMI, on the one hand, or SESAC, on the other.
With respect to the first variable, there are eight separate population tiers, the lowest being fewer than 250,000 and the highest topping off at 3,000,000 or more.
As to the second, there will now be separate grids of royalty rates for (a) music stations and (b) “talk format” stations. The former category includes all stations which devote at least 20% of their programming to content in which music is the “principal focus of audience attention”. The latter includes stations whose program content “primarily consists of talk shows, news programs, sports, community affairs or religious sermons (or other non-music-oriented programming)” and who don’t devote at least 20% of their programming to music annually.
And finally, the royalty grids for music and talk NCE stations will be the same for ASCAP and BMI songs. SESAC content will be subject to a separate set of rates which will be lower than the ASCAP/BMI rates. The rates will all rise in gradual increments annually over the five-year term.
Recording Rights
Finally, the cost of the recording rates and terms will increase very slightly (by only a few dollars) for every type of noncommercial broadcast station.
The grids laying out all the various rates are set out in the Federal Register notice. You can use them to find the rates that will apply to your particular station. And you can always contact me if you have questions finding the rate applicable to you. That may not be necessary, though, because you can rest assured that ASCAP, BMI and/or SESAC will be contacting broadcasters sooner rather than later, asking them to put pen to paper on their new agreements, with these new rates, for 2013.
