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They are going to begin collecting a $5/month Royalty Administration Fee from all stations, including personal stations which have previously been free. They are collecting it regardless of broadcaster's location or broadcast content (news, talk, non-label acts). The fee is for more than just royalty payments and the mention a suggestion from SoundExchange to indie artists to get registered to collect royalties.

Dirk

Just wanted to say thanks for bringing the day of silence to my attention. I have changed my usual radio format on Live365 from techno to silence. I have also included a few minute long, silent MP3s with various slogans on them such as "Save Internet Radio", etc... Hopefully this will help raise awareness as well.

JOhn

At one end of the spectrum are a small group of webcasters such as Yahoo! and AOL well-established Internet companies, with numerous successful revenue streams, tens of millions of subscribers or users, and well-defined infrastructures already in place. ... In stark contrast are most webcasters (such as Live365), which currently operate at the opposite end of the spectrum. These webcasters are in the early stages of development, are constantly experimenting with different business models, revenue sources, and methods of developing their customer base, and have not yet established substantial revenue streams. ...

In determining the royalty rate and methodology that willing buyers in the marketplace would accept, the CARP focused on a single license agreement which was negotiated between Yahoo! and the RIAA. ... the CARP's emphasis on a single agreement which was negotiated by an atypical webcaster was arbitrary and erroneous.

Good luck getting me to buy a CD. I would rather pay for a streaming service that has that variety anyday.

It doesn't matter if the judge rules in Napster's favor, since Napster is trying to do exactly what the labels are doing with MusicNet and PressPlay anyways. Who cares if Napster lives or dies if we'll just end up with another sucky music subscription service.

What I'm worried about is the decision earlier this week about the fees webcasters will pay for streaming online music (See earlier article). The fees ended up being much higher than the webcasters wanted (and much lower than the RIAA wanted). What this means for us is that all the decent online radio services, like Live365, will go out of business because they won't be able to afford the licensing fees, which will be on top of the already high bandwidth fees. So, we'll get stuck with the large music companies owning the digital music space, just like they do the current retail CD business.

Try live365. Type in a genre you like "surf" or "lounge" for example, or even a band name you like, and I guarantee you'll find something cool.

They also have a hosting feature, which allows you to stream your own MP3s (even from a modem connection). Very cool.

faq about oal here.
interesting discussion on list group here.
radio station on live365 playing OAL here.

Meanwhile, there's a study circulating saying that people don't and won't purchase heavily restricted music online at higher prices for a less useful item. This is apparently a revelation to the music industry.

This is a good point and indeed a revelation to the e-book industry as well. Its sad that all the corporations just don't get it. We are not going to pay more for a less restrictive format just because your marketing execs who use AOL think its cool and "chic". Also, I just got a message from Live365 (huge internet radio broadcasting house) the other day saying they will begin charging for new users in October :(

Glad they are keeping what they call "founder radio stations" like mine free.. thanks Live365 :)

JOhn

In contravention of this precaution, you have created software which enables users to store these broadcasts. This has circumvented a "technological measure" which "effectively controls access" to copyrighted works. See RealNetworks, Inc. v. Streambox, Inc., No. C99-2070P, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1889, at *18-19 (W.D. Wash. Jan. 18, 2000). Such manipulation of Live365's protective measures constitutes a violation of the provisions of the DMCA.


Ya, it's a load of bullshit, but unless you can afford to defend it you SoL.

-Jon

The appeal of online radio is diversity. As we all know all the little radio stations have been bought out by conglomerates. The result is a homogeneous environment of pop, classic rock, and rap on the airwaves leaves out more than a few genres. I love to listen to techno music and metal on the Internet. With tens of thousands of radio stations on the Internet I have alot more choice and have discovered many bands which I would not have heard otherwise (bought their CDs too). I highly suggest you check out Live365 then perhaps you will see the marvel that is online radio.

JOhn
http://www.live365.com/stations/26727

Why not use live365? Very good selection, and hardly ever any ads. The ads last for like 15 seconds and are only like every half hour. Check them out at www.live365.com

For doing your own streaming broadcast legally, check out Live365.com. You can either upload mp3s to their server and have them handle the bandwidth, or if you want more control, you can do it yourself and use them as more of a promotion/legality sort of thing. Though, I'm not sure how much support they give you legally if you are controlling the whole broadcast on your own PC. If you use theirs, you have to agree to a set of rules that basically say that you can't play more than a set number of songs from one album in a row, and some other things. They're registered with ASCAP and whoever else manages that sort of thing.

In my opinion the broadcast is still the same, it just gets to their listeners differently. I doubt that the DJ's pay for the stream, or that the cost of the stream eats a lot out of their pay. Until I see some information from the AFTRA on their reasoning behind this, I am guessing this is about easy money and using absurd logic.

I was wondering, could this be due out of fear because now just about anyone can become an online DJ? With services provided by Live365 and other sites I could see them worried. All the stations I listen to online are provided by services like this, I hardly ever listen to a regular radios station's internet stream.

But I know this theory about online DJ's makes no sense because by doing this they are turning people away from them which will lead to people finding other alternatives like the mentioned non "professional DJ" ran stations. Also they still will have radio listeners, even though they will not be getting a easy 300% increase for doing what they have been doing for years.

Anyone find anything on their site about their reasoning behind this?

Kevin Hodapp

The company acknowledged that the primary driver behind the upgrade was competition from other codecs, including Windows Media Audio, that purport to offer equivalent or better sound quality at half the MP3 data rate.

1st off. Windows Media Audio (what a crappy name), does NOT offer 128kbit MP3 quality at 64kbit. it's not even close, and you don't need a kick ass pair of speakers from here to tell the difference. Secoundly this is FUD in response to FUD. There lieing about Microsoft's success and saying "we can do the same thing". it's all a lie.

Now what IS true is that Windows Audio Whatever does offer much better quality at lower bitrate, WAAAYYY better quality. MP3 is really geared for >128kbit, while Windows Audio is really for OggVorbis Monty does talk about how OGG should scale very well to lower bitrates, so don't really expect and new compitition.

The new format is going to be fantastic news for sites like Nullsoft's shoutcast.com , live365.com (which only has 56 and lower streams). Where lower bitrates are very common, and well.. sounds like crap.

Finally this is a good marketing move, For microsoft to say, "We have something better" doesn't mean much, for the guys who made the big #1 success to say "We can a new version, that's better". means a lot. It's like "MP3 II, the return of the codec". that and making it backwards compatible is going to mean instance acceptance.

Also FgH is going to be able to protect it's IP better this time around, maybe not even release a "dist10" (demo source) like they did last time, which spawned LAME, BladeEnc, and every other codec outthere.

Hopefully we all give this the big middle one, and use OggVorbis, unfortantly it's not done, and currently performes like crap.. at least for now. hopefully in the future this will change.

-Jon

well i couldn't find a 24/7 metalica station at live365, but i did find 150 stations that play metalica here

-Jon

well i couldn't find a 24/7 metalica station at live365, but i did find 150 stations that play metalica here

-Jon

What about those of us that have Live365 stations?

I've wondered the same thing before. I don't think RealAudio wants you to be able to save streams for liability reasons. And i just did some tinkering with winamp's writing capabilities... It appears that broadcasts using SHOUTcast (streaming MP3 ala live365) also do not allow you to record streams due to "copyright issues".

RIAA and associates, do not read below:
If you are using windows, there's a piece of software called Stream Save that lets you save a SHOUTcast stream to disk (still in MP3 format). If you are running Linux there's a program called paudio that lets you capture and save raw audio data being written to the soundcard. You might be able to mod it to compress it to mp3/vorbis/whetever before it hits the disk with a little tinkering.

At the risk of some RIAA maven finding it, very few people seem to have mentioned the Shoutcast DNAS and Icecast. Shoutcast is moving towards generating analysis of listeners including the 'golden number' of listener time. Site/station popularity is already covered by the Shoutcast directory and associated services like Live 365. While low bandwidth continues to be common, 24 or 56k streaming of the traditional one-to-many radio format remains a popular and usable choice for online listening. The majority of servers on the system tend to be hobbyist or vanity shows but I'm sure it wouldn't take much work to integrate a big hard drive full of tunes with some smart database software to create a DARLA-ish server for streaming .

I think that a lot of radio jockeys could use mp3s a lot easier than cd's...that is one thing that a lot of radio stations in my area haven't used at all...It would be thousands of times easier to have all of your songs right on one computer without having to worry about your cd changer and track numbers...need a song? just hit find and find it right away...you could schedule your playlist weeks ahead of time and have your morning show ready before anyone wakes up...the mp3 and winamp broadcasters seem to be more internet based.

I, personally use shoutcast and winamp and live365 to broadcast our own radio show at iceball.net/awm and we have seen how much easier it is to use winamp and mp3s and all of that...before, we were using tapes and a big tape player, and a cd player and it was quite the pain to get everything in order for one broadcast...now it is simple..If everyone switches over, it will make it a million times easier...especially if the radio stations stream over the net as well.

just my 2 senses..

Also check out:

http://www.farmclub.com/
http://www.garageband.com/
http://www.live365.com/

ObRIAA/Napster: As a way to access bootlegged music, it's awesome. I do think it's only fair that the artists (directly) receive some sort of compensation for their studio-recorded material. As much as I dislike advertising, why couldn't compensation be derived from tacking on short audio adver-bytes onto the front of every nth Napster-like download? That way the user doesn't have to micro-pay for downloads, but if they want to guarantee no-advert recordings, they have to buy the CD.

(ObPlug: Of course you're more than welcome to listen to our stuff... And cast one vote for Today's High to open for Edwin at Navan Fair. Voting ends today. :-)

You can choose from dozens of radio stations.

When it prompts you to download the .pls file, download it, and view it.

Then pass the url you see into xmms.

Enjoy !

I have downloaded very few MP3s from Napster/Gnutella/Whatever. What I have done is converted my entire (250+) CD collection to MP3s. Then, I set up a streaming MP3 radio station (or, depending on your tastes, a *steaming* MP3 radio station).

I initially did this so I could listen to my entire collection from work. Until you try it, you have no idea what a rush it is to be able to put 2 weeks of continuous music on random.

At that point, I thought "Hey, I'm already streaming this stuff off, why not let other people listen?", so I put my station up to the public, using Live365 to rebroadcast. Then I got tired of having to rely on my Windoze machine staying up to be able to stream, so I set up icecast (GPL'd implementation of the shoutcast server), and grabbed this cool library called libshout, and wrote a small perl script to send my music data out.

Suddenly, not only am I releasing a GPL'd tool for streaming MP3s, but this has turned into a full-blown hobby. And let me tell ya, if you thought putting 2 weeks of music on random was cool, releasing your first free software on Freshmeat is quite a rush. :)

In the last 2 months, I have spent close to $300 on new CDs to add to my "radio station" lineup. Previously, I think I spent maybe $10 or $20 every couple of months on new CDs.

Plus, I write music as a hobby, and those songs are part of my lineup as well, so as the station gets more popular, my music is exposed to more people. I don't charge for my music, people are welcome to download it for free to do with as they please, but I like knowing that people are listening to (and hopefully liking) my music.

All in all, I think the record companies have done quite well by me.

:wq!

should I calculate the money I've spent on music over the past month...hmmm, 3 cd's, 4 live shows, various cover charges....nope too much to keep track of.

I understand your point, but you need to get this through your head. Just because it's free doesn't mean you can't support it. I would hazard a guess that to get a professionally (perhaps not as much as it takes to make Sugar Ray sound good) recorded CD costs around $10,000. Recording live shows (outside of the cost of musical instruments and amps, which are necessary regardless) costs about $300. Putting in on the Net costs less (and takes about half an hour). Building a radio station around it, costs less. My point? Stuff ain't so tough as it used to be.

you wouldn't HAVE 99% of the music on your hard drives and CR-Rs.

and my guess is that most people who play it like that don't listen to 99% of their music and are wasting disk space. I used to share video games when I was a kid too. Now I buy them. I could still get them for free, but I don't need too. And I understand that taking without giving any back doesn't work as a long term solution. But we have this really cool Internet thing, that makes a lot of the initial cost of making money off of music (reproduction, distrubution, and promotion!!) disappear. Why ignore it and act like a phonograph is our only avenue to musical appreciation. Why ignore it and keep supporting a broken system. Who taught you that sharing inexhaustible resources was wrong?
--

As far as CPU power for encoding a 24Kbps stream only used about 10-15% on my AMD K6-2 350, and was able to get 96Kbps stereo stream going running the encoder and icecast on the same system streaming to three other clients with about 70% CPU usage.

You might also want to look at www.live365.com to do actual streaming to the clients. This was the solution I had recommended for a local radio station, but they decided to go to Micro$oft solution instead.

- Subsolar

I originally tried using the 25-user free version of the RealAudio server, but it had too many technical limitations, crashed frequently, limited our listenership, and stopped me from adding/changing features in the program, since it's binary only. Since then, I've been using icecast, which has 4 identical streams of differing quality (one for the intranet, 3 for modems). I'm using LAME to encode the MP3s, and liveice is setup to save the live broadcasts to an MP3 on the hard disk for archiving purposes. Afterhours, we rebroadcast the previous day's archive.mp3 using icecast's shout program. The transition from broadcasting the archives w/ shout to broadcasting live with liveice is handled by a couple cron scripts.

There's no keyboard on the server, but it has a perl script continuously running on tty10, displaying the current number of listeners, total listeners per day, average listening time, etc (all this is obtained from the icecast logfile).

We also keep about a week's worth of archives available for listeners to download on demand, and they are accessible through a little perl program I wrote called MP3 Report Generator.

When we started out, we thought bandwidth would be a problem if we had too many simultaneous listeners, so we signed up for a free account at live365.com, which relays our broadcast to up to 365 users. This worked out well, since we could redirect all our listeners to the live365 server and reduce the load on ours. I just found a funky little tool here that monitors your live365 stats (i haven't tried this yet, but i probably will).

If you're curious about more of the server stats, go to www.bwscampus.com/KBWS and click "about" on the lower left corner.

- the mad diPPer!

----
I'm not stoned, I just chugged a pack of fUN dIP!

1. As mentioned above the premeir open-source on is www.icecast.org, The original is www.shoutcast.com, for additional resources and to talk to people their is www.shoutclub.com.

2. If you want to stream *live* audio then liveice (which is part of icecast) shout work, if you on windows then use the SC plugin for winamp.

3.One of the biggest problems isnt software its bandwidth!! A decent sounding stream is at least 56K minimum, even with a T1 your nadwidth can max out quickly, if your stream is non-commercial then look into www.live365.com which provides free bandwidth for non-commercial streams along with a slew of tools.

4. If you need more advice then check out www.bigfreakinserver.com. This is our site we have a forum which we monitor frequently and will be happy to answer any streaming questions. bigfreak pipes out 3 streams over a 768Kbps DSL line, running on a dual proc Celercon, running FreeBSD :).

5. Finally here is a little fun tools for all you stream listeners, called streamripper located at www.bigfreakinserver.com (Look in the PROJECTS section). Which allows you to hook up to an mp3 and rip the tracks directly to your hardrive :). very fun indeed.

Well enjoy the resources.

However, illegally copying/stealing music is not the way to do it. That will simply encourage the government to pass stricter laws to stop you.

Exactly, and when our laws require that 25% of the 18-25 year-olds in this country go to jail for copyright infringement, it will be obvious to everyone (and not just the gifted souls who can pick points out an idiot's rantings) that our current IP laws are a pile of shit.

MP3.com is not bad. I prefer streaming music, since I have my own pipe and limited disk space. Try here and here for starters.
--

Yes, last time I checked, I thought ShoutCast and Spinner.com et all were doing a great job. Minus the lag. Minus the packet dropping and switching. Minus the advertisements.

hmm, you might want to work on your bandwidth. I listen to streaming audio all the time, and yes, there are some weaker signals, but finding a strong one isn't too tough. The one that I've been on lately (TagsTrance) has been flawless, and that's been tested with over 12 hours of coninuous listening. And I've YET to hear an ad. Live365 is another good place to find quality streams.

--

hmm, are you familar with the consolidation that has occurred recently in the radio industry?

Do you know who really decides playlists and formats?

DJs play (for most big commercial radio stations) exactly what they are told to.

One of the big problems with radio in general at this point in time, is the corruption at high levels. Big time payola and kickbacks. There is a current scandal right now with the PDs and GMs at major New York stations where they recieved full all expense paid trips to Bermuda, provided by Ricky Martin's marketing reps.

If you want commercial free "radio" try shoutcast or live365 or any other collections that I haven't stumbled across yet.

Radio, IMHO, sucks.

What I want is the server portion so anyone and everyone can create their own server as MP3 broadcaster.

you want live365. (I am not affiliated, but it's amazing what kind of free advertising you can get from people who like your service...) here's the deeper link

What I want is the server portion so anyone and everyone can create their own server as MP3 broadcaster.

you want live365. (I am not affiliated, but it's amazing what kind of free advertising you can get from people who like your service...) here's the deeper link

as the cost to an individual or business of setting one up wouldn't exceed the cost of a server and the tracks being played.

visit live365 (this free plug in return for all the commercial free music I get from them)

I've never been a big fan of streaming media

live365 and shoutcast

I listen to streaming music at least 5 hours a day, only stuff I want to, and NO commercials. Streaming music kicks ass (yes, you do need a broadband connection, dial-up is soo 20th century). I'll agree with you on the video part, but I don't think it will take 10 years. Things are improving on both ends, bandwidth and processing power. Bandwidth gets you the bits and processing rearranges them into pretty pictures. I've seen a few good streamers, and the pr0n industry seems to have it working fairly well (or so a little bird told me), but I think 3-5 years is more accurate than 10. With a good server, off-peak times, and a bit of luck I've gotten full screen video that's within a factor of 2 to TV (antennae) quality (Wierd Al's Star Wars video is a good example).

BTW, another good short film site is AtomFilms

for some cool streams and to promote your own stuff try live365, I've found some sweet streams there (check j's ambient). Looks like they give out some free b-width, but I haven't used 'em for that.

There are plenty of places to get hosted besides mp3.com. I almost started a service myself, but didn't have the bandwidth to do so, or the resources to ship band CDs. However, there are lots of places like mp3.com which will host your music and some will sell cds.

CD Now is starting a program much like mp3.com set to open shortly.
CDuctive hosts indie artists.
eMusic may be able to help you, but they're pretty big.
Live365 will host 365mb worth of mp3s (in 56kbps encoding) and stream them 24/7 for you. Who says it can't be your own stuff..
Cruch Music is for British dance/techno musicians
Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) will definetly sign you, for a slight fee, but they can sell your music per track.
MusicMatch might sign you
WorldWideBands for those musicians around the globe.

For more info, check out a backissue of WIRED magazine, entitled "I Want My MP3". Right now it's a musicians market on the net.

Actually, with liveice and icecast, it can work quite well. You can configure it to use different encoders like FhG and Xing to encode the audio live from the soundcard. I'm the student engineer at my station here in Miami, WVUM, and we're in the process of putting together a box for this purpose. Some guy from the school of communications tried to sell the advisory board on RealAudio, but for any decent amount of users, the licensing cost goes into the tens of thousands of dollars, even with an "educational discount." We're going to try to use Live 365 for starters, until we get more bandwidth from the university. If anyone has any advice or experience on that or any related issues, please feel free to share.