Bonnie Simmons

Bonnie Simmons is my favorite music deejay at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. She is also a Bay Area radio legend and influential manager and promoter of bands, from Dire Straits and Rickie Lee Jones in the 1980s to Noe Venable and Etienne de Rocher today. In addition to hosting a terrific Thursday night show on KPFA, Simmons serves as Chair of the listener supported frequency's Local Station Board.

So it seemed appropriate for LLFCC to interview her about the controversy over the Copyright Royalty Board's recent decision to raise Internet radio music copyright fees, especially since yesterday KPFA joined a host of Internet streaming stations that went streaming silent in protest of the decision.

LLFCC: It seems that you guys at KPFA are not happy with Copyright Royalty Board's (CRB) recent ruling. What's the problem?

Bonnie Simmons: Well, one of the big issues is how the royalty rate is calculated, and what it will cost us to be able to properly account to Sound Exchange [the group that collects and distributes Internet royalties]. It is also possible that we may have to limit the number of people who can stream KPFA during any one hour so that our fees don't get to a point that would be a burden to us. But to my mind, a perhaps larger issue is that many Internet radio stations may disappear completely. If the figures that are bandied about as to what Internet music outlets would have to be paying, it does seem absurd to me. What I suspect will happen is what they are all saying. That they will not be able to continue in business.

LLFCC: My understanding is the revenue calculation will go from a percentage of revenue to a per song, per listener fee. Why is that bad?

Bonnie Simmons: I believe that artists should be paid for their work. But this change indicates to me that all of us will be forced to build a huge reporting infrastructure just to account to the CRB and Sound Exchange. If I understand it correctly, we would have to determine how many songs were played in a given hour, or how many minutes went to music, and multiply that by how many people had gone on the stream during that hour - and after a number of other pieces of a fairly complicated formula, we would arrive at the number of "aggregate hours." Now, this has been pitched to musicians by Sound Exchange as the only way that they will be compensated for their work - but what keeps running through my head is that in the case of non-commercial radio stations, most of whom play a very wide array of different artists, and musical styles, is that without really bizarre in depth reporting systems, there won't be any way for them to determine which artists got played and thus, how the money gets sent to the artists.

Although we are still trying to get our feet planted at KPFA concerning this, ideas seem to run toward limiting the amount of people who can stream KPFA at any given time so that we don't go over the aggregate hour limit which kicks us into individual payments per song - the more pessimistic folks talk about having to remove our Internet streams completely. Part of our mission is "to engage in any activity that shall contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors; to gather and disseminate information on the causes of conflict between any and all of such groups." It would logically follow to me that we would want to reach as many people as possible and one of the most important ways to do so is through the Internet.

LLFCC: I have to say that, in my attempts to follow this issue, I've found it pretty confusing.

Bonnie Simmons: I honestly don't know all the intricacies of the reporting structure we are supposed to comply with. As you know I'm just one volunteer programmer at KPFA and although I've tried to keep up with this, I haven't quite carved enough hours out of my day to read all the decisions and correlate them to a station like KPFA - but I do have a pretty wide network of people who work at various things in the music world and I have yet to find anyone, whether a radio person, record company person, or artist who has researched this to the extent necessary to really articulate it. All I can go by, is what I read - and in reading what folks who have Internet radio stations have had to say - I haven't come across any one of them who has said that this will be less than catastrophic to them. In many cases they will owe more in fees than their entire revenue stream.

I get a lot of the information about new artists from listening to various internet radio stations - I also am a personal manager for a couple of artists who are early in their careers, and they get almost all the exposure they have gotten from internet, non-commercial and satellite radio. It's a really big ol' world out there and it doesn't make any sense to me that with all these possibilities now for us to receive information whether it be through music, or news; radio, satellite radio or internet radio, that we would all willingly go along with something that will result in a tiny amount of these sources surviving.

One final rambling thought here which has really been making me crazy, but it just came into shape for me - Sound Exchange seems to be claiming that they will be paying out to artists based on information as to what songs actually did get played and how many people were listening online when those songs were played. So, does that mean that each radio station will have to report individual titles of songs so that this can be done accurately? In a given 24 hour day at KPFA I would imagine upwards of several hundred DIFFERENT songs might be played - and we are just one tiny station among thousands, and only half of our programming is music. . . so how the heck is that going to be done fairly? For commercial stations there are systems like BDS who can actually audit the stations and come up with a playlist of what was played, but for stations like KPFA who do not have pre- ordained playlists it's not possible.

LLFCC: I would imagine that because you manage bands, you see this issue from more than one perspective.

Bonnie Simmons: Because I manage bands, and they're independent artists so they have their own record companies, I get the letters from Sound Exchange. I am kind of put off by their take on it, which is essentially "if this doesn't go through, you'll never get a penny. You're going to need this as a musician in order to survive." And every time I hear that there are many many artists behind the stance that they've taken, I never see a list.

I have come to a place and I think many others have come to the place where we get turned on to music through Internet radio stations. I kind of straddle the line on this because I work with musicians and I want them to be able to make a living through copyright payments. But especially in the case of non-commercial radio, it's the game. It's where musicians get exposure. It doesn't make sense to me that artists would indeed want that cut off.