The website for 99.1 JOY FM in St. Louis encompasses a scrolling playlist of its lineup of Christian pop music and a “listen now” button to tune in to the simulcast broadcast. But visitors may find that after a number of hours of streaming artists like Lauren Daigle and Brandon Lake, the positioning may kick them off.
Because of upper royalty costs, many noncommercial religious broadcasters are selecting to either limit the variety of online listeners they permit at a time or just not promote their online platforms in any respect. A latest lawsuit from a few of these broadcasters, including many Christian stations, claims that their royalty rate, which exceeds what other stations pay, is effectively a form of spiritual discrimination.
“The government is charging religious broadcasters a significantly higher rate,” said Rory Gray, with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “It suppresses religious speech in the general public sphere.”
Noncommercial radio stations—which depend on listener support and grant funding reasonably than ad sales—have traditionally been capable of negotiate lower royalty rates for the music they play. But religious broadcasters, like JOY FM’s owner, Gateway Creative Broadcasting, lost out on that deal during negotiations in 2016 with SoundExchange, the rights management company that distributes royalties to artists.
Then streaming costs for religious radio increased in 2021, following a ruling from the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), and Christian stations were subject to the usual rates. A suit filed in February against the board claims that attributable to the discrepancy in rates set by the CRB and privately negotiated rates, noncommercial religious broadcasters are forced to limit their streams in ways other noncommercial stations, like public radio, should not.
“Noncommercial religious broadcasters at the moment are paying rates at a industrial level,” said Gray, who serves as counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters Noncommercial Music License Committee within the case. “They just need to pay a good rate, the identical rate that the secular NPR stations are paying.”
According to ADF, noncommercial religious broadcasters at the moment are paying a rate 18 times higher than the common rate given to NPR stations. (Both public radio and college radio stations privately negotiated deals with SoundExchange.)
Some within the Christian music industry are cheering the changes in royalty agreements since they assist artists make profit. The lower rates for noncommercial religious broadcasters have historically resulted in Christian artists receiving far less royalty revenue than their mainstream peers.
In a 2023 article for Billboard magazine, Malcolm Hawker, chief operating officer for SESAC Music Group and former president and CEO of Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) said that the regulatory system around radio, especially with regards to Christian radio, is broken.
Referring to K-LOVE’s parent company, Educational Media Foundation, Hawker said that nonprofit status obscures the fact that EMF is a financial powerhouse with over $1 billion in assets.
“This is a far cry from the small volunteer-run community stations the CRB rates are supposed to protect,” Hawker wrote. “I feel that it’s inherently unfair for these networks to use the CRB rate structure that’s available to educational radio stations given their financial profiles and the numerous amount of cash they raise using music to construct a big audience.”
Hawker focuses totally on royalty structures for airtime, while the case ADF is making on behalf of spiritual stations has to do with royalty fees for online streaming. But the issue Hawker identifies is identical: that Christian artists generally see lower royalty revenue partly because many of the broadcasters that program their music pay noncommercial rates.
ADF says that this case isn’t about giving religious broadcasters the proper to pay artists less but reasonably in regards to the higher royalty rate in comparison with NPR stations. “If the speed was the identical, we wouldn’t have a discrimination case,” said Gray.
In a statement, ADF senior counsel John Bursch said, “Religious broadcasters must have the liberty to exercise their faith and free speech without discrimination, but government officials are forcing them to pay exorbitant fees or have their constitutionally protected speech suppressed.”
NPR stations are also classified as noncommercial broadcasters and are eligible for funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which doesn’t fund organizations whose programming “furthers the principles of particular political or religious philosophies.”
Because NPR was capable of reach a non-public agreement with SoundExchange while the National Religious Broadcasters Noncommercial Music License Committee was not, the CRB rates apply to nonreligious industrial broadcasters but to not NPR. The CRB rates kick in for noncommercial religious stations with a median audience size of 218 listeners or more.
ADF says that that is, effectively, religious discrimination, although SoundExchange, which will not be technically a celebration within the lawsuit, contributed to the present state of conflict.
According to Gray, the Supreme Court will determine whether they are going to hear the case in mid-June. For the time being, religious broadcasters are stuck with the rates set by CRB. SoundExchange has also filed an appeal, arguing that the CRB’s 2021 ruling didn’t do enough to bring rates for webcasters consistent with streaming services.
As the music industry struggles to regulate to a landscape dominated by streaming and social media, radio broadcasters are attempting to modernize and find their place in it. Some industry veterans insist that the way forward for radio is online streaming, so the survival of noncommercial religious broadcasters is determined by their ability to seek out a sustainable model under increasingly streaming-centric rules and regulations.
