by SHANE SINNOTT

In America, leader of all things litigious and patented, it seems they’ve decided to redraft the royalty rules for online radio stations. As you read this, the new rules dictated by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board will have been in effect for one month, rules that will seem positively draconian to all but the most heartless of over-lobbied Republicans.

The new system is as follows: a minimum of $500 per year, per channel. Fees are then added per song played, which start at $0.0008 per “performance,” which is defined as—here’s the kicker—streaming one song to one listener. So if a station has 20,000 listeners, they pay 20,000 times the fee for each song they stream. Also—and this is a real kick in the pants as well—all fees are applied retroactively from Jan. 1, 2006, and increase 30 per cent every year. In short, it fucks the business model of many online broadcasters, who as a whole are projected to pay four times as much in royalty fees as good ol’ terrestrial broadcasters by 2008.

In late June, many online broadcasters shut their stations down for a “day of silence” in protest, and for now, there has a been a temporary stay of rate enforcement while rates are revised. Incidentally, many are predicting a mass migration here to Canada, where the rules don’t apply, though it’s hard to imagine how that would work practically. More info can be found at www.savenetradio.org.

Now, onto the more serious business of new music downloading. Tracks from the forthcoming Sunset Rubdown album, entitled Random Spirit Lover, are all over the place. The single “Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days” (WTF?) is available here: tinyurl.com/2j6woj. It’s good, but doesn’t reveal as much about the album as “The Mending of the Gown,” which you can get at tinyurl.com/353p3v. And finally, in violation of a long-held personal rule against the song due to overplayedness issues, I offer you Kanye West messing around with Peter Björn & John’s “Young Folks”: tinyurl.com/yu9x9l.