It's hot outside. You'd love to go swimming. But you have no pool, the public pools are disgusting, the beach is too far away, and you can't afford a private club. What do you do? Get the government to force your neighbor to build a pool, of course. That's what it looks as if the record industry is doing and, by extension, radio broadcasters. The two industries have combined to propose an FM radio be built into every cellphone.
Even though NAB has been floating this FM mandate for more than two years, for some reason, the recent proposal sparked a flurry of WTF?! rebuttals from both the CTIA Wireless Association and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).
How did it come to this silliness?
For nearly a decade now, the record industry has been trying to staunch the desertion of music buyers from CDs to non-physical digital sources. Labels aren't as flush, artists aren't as flush, and of course it doesn't help that today's popular music is about as innovative and interesting as Lawrence Welk backed with a drum machine. In short, the record business is in the crapper. Its solution? Get someone else to pay for its screw-ups.
So the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) went to Congress, resulting in two Performance Rights Act bills, HR 848 in the House and S 379 in the Senate, each mandating radio stations pay artists a royalty every time a song is played on the radio. Heretofore, only songwriters were compensated, the theory being that radio play was free promotion for artists and record labels. Asking radio stations to now pay artists to promote their wares is sort of like Proctor & Gamble asking your local Jack FM to pay to broadcast Crest commercials. (Our willingness to overpay for a sweatshirt with "Fitch" emblazoned across the chest seems to make affirm this bass-ackwards pay-us-to-advertise-our-product logic, but I digress.)
Unsurprisingly, broadcasters have cried foul, calling these extended royalties "taxes" (about as accurate a description as calling Park 51 a "mosque at Ground Zero," but I again digress), arguing the these increased fees would place an undue burden on a lot of stations struggling in the current economy.
So, the NAB and the RIAA huddled and came up with a compromise. More listeners mean more revenue, ergo, more radios would mean more listeners, ergo, more listeners mean more money for FM radio stations to pay the new royalties, ergo — all cellphones should have FM radios.
CTIA/CEA say that NAB/RIAA have a problem and they expect another industry to solve it for them, hence the swimming pool story.
At first, NAB's justification for the FM mandate seemed to be that people were demanding FM radios in their cellphones and those dumb schmucks at Apple, RIM, Motorola, LG, Samsung, HTC, et al., weren't accommodating. Once that argument was laughed out of the room, NAB switched its rationale to a public safety issue. Congress passed a law in 2006 that called for cell carriers to voluntarily institute Commerical Mobile Alert Service (CMAS), essentially an emergency texting service — which none as yet have, leaving a gaping hole in the emergency notification process an included FM radio could help fill. (If you're worried about being alerted to emergencies via your cellie, your municipal government likely offers text or Twitter alerts; for instance, I subscribe to New York City's alert system, NYC Notify.)
Even if all of NAB's arguments made sense, from a libertarian POV, where did they and the RIAA get balls big enough to demand the government force one private business to include technologies to satisfy and profit another private business?
From themselves and CEA, of course. The on again-off again lobbying groups were either for or against mandating the digital transition, which first forced TV makers to put digital tuners in their TVs (NAB for, CEA against) and then all of us to upgrade to new digital TVs (NAB against, CEA for).
Even though NAB thinks the FM mandate is good idea regardless, this whole capitalist-libertarian conundrum may be much ado about nothing. The two Congressional bills were introduced more than a year ago and have little Republican support and NAB's mandate hasn't made it any further than the informal proposal stage.
As they say on the air, stay tuned.
