ibiblio hosts several digital audio streams, all of which broadcast copyrighted material regularly. You may have wondered, “How are intellectual property owners paid when their recordings are broadcast online?” In the USA, royalties are owed to intellectual property owners each time a sound recording is played. An organization that centralizes management of these these rights for public radio stations that stream online is SoundExchange. Additionally, SoundExchange provides payments to artists and intellectual property owners when their music is broadcast online. To ensure an equitable distribution of royalties, data associated with the sound recording is processed, and a payment is collected from the statutory licensee. Then, shares are allocated, processed, and distributed to the intellectual property owners. You can follow this link to visit SoundExchange’s official website. Additionally, you can learn more about SoundExchange’s history and purpose via the associated Wikipedia page.
SoundExchange compliance helps to ensure that royalties from broadcast sound recordings are distributed properly. Each audio stream we host must send SoundExchange reports to ensure royalties are properly distributed. One of the most important things this report includes is the total number of times a recording is received by a unique listener. This is known as the actual total performances, or more colloquially as “per play, per listener.” Our audio streams produce logs which we can then compile into a report for SoundExchange. Actual total performances is used to calculate the amount owed by a radio station to the intellectual property owners.
Equitable distribution of royalties helps keep the digital audio streams we host sustainable. You can visit some of these radio stations and access their online streams for your music listening pleasure. Here are a few of the radio stations we host:
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- Concierto – Spanish/English classical music produced by WDAV
- WCPE, The Classical Station
- WXYC – UNC-Chapel Hill’s student radio station