KCRW ready to rumble on royalty fees: station vows fight as payments to labels and artists for Webcast material skyrocket.

REPRESENTATIVES at National Public Radio and L.A. public radio broadcaster KCRW-FM (89.1) say they won't go down without a fight over the suddenly spiking royalties they must pay for Webcasting. National Public Radio will now be filing a petition on behalf of all its affiliate stations, including KCRW, for reconsideration with the Copyright Royalty Board, which two weeks ago significantly increased the royalties paid to musicians and record labels for streaming digital songs online. In the process, the board ended a discounted fee for small Internet broadcasters such as KCRW. The Santa Monica-based station has been in the vanguard of Web-casting and offers an extensive list of songs and live performances on its Web site.

Ruth Seymour, KCRW's general manager, said the ruling flies in the face of the very purpose of public radio--being a service to the community.

"A public station, if it fulfills its mandate and builds a large audience, gets penalized by being treated as a commercial station. We are here in the public interest, we' re not here to sell products or merchandise," Seymour said. "The rates are egregious, and the philosophy is worse. I believe that we're early in the game and negotiations will follow."

If the appeal falls, the pubcasters could ask Congress to intervene or go to court.

As a non-profit, KCRW had been subject to a $500 annual flat fee per radio channel for a certain number of listening hours per month. Under the old royalty agreement negotiated between the RIAA and Internet radio stations in 2002, the rates paid to performers were between 6 percent and 12 percent of a station's revenue. Congress established the Copyright Royalty Board in 2004 to come up with new fees, which are retroactive to last year.

"Public radio's agreements on royalties with all such organizations, including the Recording Industry Association of America, have always taken into account our public service mission and non-profit status," said Andi Sporkin, NPR's vice president for communications. "These new rates, at least 20 times more than what stations have paid in the past, treat us as if we were commercial radio."

The anticipated impact of the ruling on KCRW is $250,000 this year, just a bit less than that amount for last year. The rates go up 30 percent a year; presuming the audience stays the same in size and doesn't grow, so by 2010 KCRW's rates would double. The new rates charge 8 cents per song per listener for 2006; 11 cents in 2007; 14 cents for 2008; 18 cents for 2009 and 19 cents for 2010.

Staff reporter Anne Riley-Katz can be reached at [e-mail] or at [phone].