SoundExchange Payments Due

All commercial and noncommercial broadcast stations that are streaming signals on the web must file an annual minimum fee statement of account form with SoundExchange and pay the $500 per channel minimum fee no later than January 31, 2019. This year, SoundExchange sent emails to most stations with links and reminders to facilitate the timely statement and fee submissions. But the January 31^st deadline applies whether or not a station received such an email.

Noncommercial Educational Webcasters who stream 80,000 or fewer monthly aggregate tuning hours can also pay the $100 per webcaster proxy fee to be exempt from filing Reports of Use, but must claim the exemption and pay the $100 by the January 31, 2019 to qualify.

In case you’ve forgotten why streaming stations have to take these actions with SoundExchange, it is because they administer the Copyright Act statutory licenses for the public performance of sound recordings via digital audio transmission. By streaming over the internet, new digital copies of the sound recordings being streamed are created, and that’s where the statutory license applies.