Just as I suspected - Negotiations! Watch the Love button reappear........
To get it they are going to have to pay more bucks in royalties than they currently are. The idea is that they want to have their own agreement with the labels and not be under their current mandated royalty schedule. Right now they can't do anything because they have no rights too. Unless they are willing to pay for the right to save songs, it isn't going to happen. Just ask these internet radio service how expensive their royalty fees are compared to what Sirius XM currently pays for the ability to cache music for offline listening. If Sirius XM just releases it without the consent and approval of the RIAA via the labels, they will get sued, just as XM did.
Mel is going to be hard pressed to pay the labels what they want in royalty fees for saving songs, but hopefully they pull it off. I think it will be important for them to have this feature going forward because they are competing with other services that allow you to cache unlimited amounts of music on devices. They other thing is that some labels/artist have certain artist they don't allow their music to be cached/saved.
Just for the record: Sirius XM operates under a statutory license and pays the required royalties under Section 114 of the Copyright Act. The rate at which Sirius XM pays these royalties is set by the CRB "Copyright Royalty Board." The CRB is comprised of three Copyright Royalty Judges who determine the rates and terms for copyright statutory licenses and make determinations on the distribution of the royalties. The judges are appointed by the Librarian of Congress.
Sirius XM would like to get away from operating under a statutory license and actually have their own agreement with the labels, which as of right now they do not have and therefore they have no rights to extra features like caching of songs.
