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Can Internet Radio Survive?
curunir writes: "Salon is running an interesting interview with the program manager for the internet radio station, SomaFM. He discusses some of the effects of the recent CARP recommendations (previously discussed on /. here). We all know the DMCA is bad, but this seems to be a particularly good example of where its broad nature is curbing reasonable web uses."
No.
IF they would get this online, I would make it survive!
I'm not listening if I have to log in.
They have no chance to survive. Make their time.
I remember showing one of my students how to use Realplayer to listen to Radio 4. The frustrating this was that most of the time we tried there was just a recorded message saying something along the lines of : "We are sorry but we do not have the rights to broadcast the programme currently on Radio 4 over the Internet".
Video Game cheats, hints a
There are no "radio" waves involved.
Maybe a name change would help...
I really hate this, they expect radio stations that stream to pay so much dang money for a LOW QUALITY broadcast that "reaches more people" .. I'm sorry, but for the quality of these broadcasts the RIAA should be PAYING THEM to play this stuff. It's next to impoosible to find real live Loveline broadcasts nowadays, and thats not just bad for inet streaming, but bad for people who actually WANT HELP with their problems who use this medium.
as crooked energy trading companies!
Tcd004
K Claffy gave an interesting presentation at the last Nanog that illustrates the futility of the Record Companies Efforts. See, in particular, her graph on file sharing usage.
The result of years of litigation and bad law making :
Napster is shut down, its successors have over 5 times the file sharing volume, and are used perhaps 100 times as much as the "legitimate" pressplay and music net services.
And they call it a famous victory...
I never understood this? You need a device, similar to or equal to a computer which costs way more than a small radio, and more importantly bandwidth, monthly fee in one location, to be able to listen to something that typically requires a $2.25 device and a AA battery.
Kinda like this new satellite radio, waiting for them to go away soon.
The new fees would be in addition to the ASCAP and BMI fees. We did some rough calculations and found that it would cost us under the terms of that ruling about $1,000 a day.
Why should be such a devastating difference in fees been an air broadcast station and an electronic broadcasting station? Sure, I can save the stream, mp3 them, but I can just as easily do the same with my FM capture card, or at least with a cassette tape.
So why doesn't CARP just give it up and rename themselves CRAP? Although the differences between the scum-sucking fish and raw human waste are negligible, with these kinds of rulings and recommendations, I think CRAP would more accurately represent the organization.
Of course it can survive. The rest of the world isn't governed by USA law. It just means you won't be able to broadcast from inside the USA.
From the interview: Well, now, when the fees suddenly go up to $350,000 a year or more, then it means basically that there's no way that a lot of stations can continue broadcasting. Their alternative is to move to start playing music purely by just unsigned artists.
That's one option. Another option is to stream only music released under the Open Audio License, or a similar license.
The economics of Internet music distribution make the royalty business model weaker. I expect many artists will begin distributing their music for free, and making their living from live shows, special events, collectibles, etc.
Of course, I could be wrong. I've been wrong before.
Ok, adding "Internet Radio" to www.fuckedcompany.com
*PRESTO*
You've been Terminated!
-------------------
I sig, therefore I was.
Even though there are increasing restrictions on the hobby, there are still some resources to help you on your quest for an Internet Radio Station. Also, don't forget to find out how you can help.
In recent years intellectual property has shifted from a free market system to a command economy. This has culminated to the DMCA and CARP (Copywright Arbitration Royalty Panel, a government appointed panel). Mark my words, if we continue down this path, the intellectual market will collapse, just as the entire market collapsed in the Soviet Union.
We can't have a single body that determines the prices for an entire segment of the market, it simply does not work. Supply and Demand is the only proven method of determining prices, and 14/100 of a cent per song per listener does not adequatelty refelct supply and demand.
Consider - normal radio is portable. AM/FM stations are available wherever there are radios. Although stations have limited broadcast ranges, everyday listeners generally don't travel between cities and thus have no problems with this. Satellite radio may eradicate even this problem. But internet radio stations depend on computers - and the reality is that the vast majority of people [even some /. readers] spend time away from their computers.
So, internet radio stations are less available than AM/FM ones. In addition, they have to struggle for revenue in the same way that .com startups do - things like banner ads and subscriptions. Because there are so many stations out there, it is not economically feasible for an advertiser to put a banner ad out on a page and simply assume that enough people will see it. And many stations play continuous music/talk, without broadcast ads. This means that they're suffering through the same money pinch that the rest of internet businesses are.
So, in the end, the CARP ruling is simply the straw that breaks the camel's back. Although it's true that many internet stations offer far superior content, they suffer from some very obvious problems. They're not portable, which makes them less convienient for their audiences; their smaller audiences make advertising less profitable anyways; and because they often depend, like other internet content businesses, on things like banner ads and subscriptions, their financial situations are often precarious anyways.
So sure, the DMCA and CARP are harming the internet radio industry. But the industry was already in trouble to begin with; this might itself have caused the same kind of commercialization and consolidation that CARP will likely force on the stations.
cost alone could kill it until a decent multicast infrastructure doesn't exist throughout the backbone and to your door via your ISPs connection.
;)
you can't seriously expect them to fund paying for a seperate chunk of bandwidth for each individual user who's receiving exactly the same data being sent at the same time as all of the rest of the listeners identical data across zillions of the same router hops?
hmm, with multicast do they pay less royalties because less copies of the data are being made in the interim?
Also major league baseball sucks. It used to be you could easily get broadcasts of games, but they have fucked that up too. If you can find a game on the web, you can only get the broadcast from the home team's announcers. If your team is on the road then you are S.O.L. because you can't hear your regular announcers. Fuck major league baseball.
I know Clear Channel stopped doing streams for a while, but they now stream everyday...they just don't play ads unless they are nationwide ads. Both WNCI and WTVN in Columbus area stream now.
Gorkman
Because if I try to set up a low-power FM station out of my bedroom here in Brooklyn to broadcast my favorite tracks to my neighbors, the FCC will throw my ass in jail for interfering with the signals of the local ClearChannel Inc. "Classic Rock" and "Alternative" stations.
The FM radio band is a scarce resource regulated by the government. In most major urban areas, there hasn't been a new station license granted in years, sometimes decades.
Internet broadcasting, on the other hand, is limited only by aggregate bandwidth. A thousand stations can sound just as good as two. And the startup costs are much, much lower: get a PC, a copy of IceCast, a $100 sound card and microphone, and suddenly you're a DJ. Sure, maybe only ten people are listening, but that's the whole point: those ten people found just the thing they were looking for.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I am the Station Manager for a small college station in Chicago, and I just received information from SESAC (one of the three big licensing companies) regarding their fees... I was rather concerned at first, given that we have a very limited budget, however their fees for broadcasting our signal online are only $102/year. If BMI and ASCAP charge similar amounts, it'll stretch our budget, however we'll be able to manage.
Of course, who knows how it will end up for commercial stations at this point.
-Tal
Is the Greaseman still around? I'd love to get a webcast of his show.
dont' ask me if internet radio can survive, read a rant by JWZ.
One interesting thing to note here is SomaFM *IS* paying to use the music, under ASCAP and BMI. They paying as a noncommercial station, about $1000 a year (college radio stations pay under the same deal). Under the CARP ruling, they would have to pay around $1000 a *DAY*.
The thing I find really disturbing about all this is the court system seems to be buying into equating Napster-like copying with legit internet-based radio stations. Yeah, I know, you can record off of a internet radio station... as you can do off a college FM station. And the quality difference isn't much off from FM (and I've rarely had my local noncommercial station lag out and get disconnects during peek time). Just because it's a noncommercial on the internet doesn't mean it should be treated any different that one that's not.
This ruling only serves to kill off the small guy, penalize the public, and let a handful of companies monopolize the radio internet radio industry.
Have you ever listened to SomaFM? They play 128kbps mp3 streams and they are always immediately accessible. Listening to their Groove Salad stream kicks serious ass while coding.
I thought the guys math was wrong when he said it would cost them $350,000 a year in fees, but after doing it myself, that seems about right (thanks The Fanfan for this equation from the old story).
1600 listeners * 24 hrs/day * 96 perfs/hr = 3686400 = $737.28 per day
That's $269,107 per year. I'm sure Soma's calculations more accurate than my own educated guesses above.
--It's Pimptastic!--
As General Manager for a college radio station in upstate New York, we too have felt the pressure of maintaining an online presence. I've been getting contract after contract to sign with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, & Publishers ) who want to charge us royalties for the amount of hits and number of listens on our website. The radio station, on a limited budget already, pays royalties to ASCAP and BMI to just play songs on our airwaves, now they want more money for our online feed. Being the cheap SOB that I am, I wonder if it's really worth it to maintain an online feed for an extra $600 a year. That's $600 that could be going to new headphones, new microphones, new turntables, etc. Making your station available to the world sounds glamorous, but baby, does it ever come with a price.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
On another note: it may help the DMCA's image if it cut the smaller stations a bit of slack. The stations can bring newer and more off-the-beaten-track music to listeners's attentions. They can find the music at the CD store and, in a round-about way, cover the fees. Assuming a price of $15, one CD could pay for about 107 songs playable on-air. This leniency can also make any anti-trust prosecutions that might crop up think twice, since the slack towards "the little guy" shows it's not out to crush the competition for the airwaves and playback rights.
This
If software has a shitty license: don't use it, don't resell it, don't support it (or at least charge alot) and don't steal it.
If music has a shitty license: don't listen to it, don't buy it, don't support it and don't steal it.
Screw the music industry, make your own music -AND- don't let them control it. Screw every industry.
You described my life to a T.
I found it interesting that it was said that internet radio and napster are different cases. I think that given the stand being taken is that the DMCA should only be concerned with perfect digital copies, and that mp3s are not perfect digital copies, it becomes a bit hard to seperate the two.
I mean, either it's perfect or it's not - how close various lossy audio formats come to perfect is a matter of much debate and so I find it hard to see how you could impose any sort of distinction other than perfect or not perfect.
I don't know about SomaFM, but there is another really great radio station called Wolf FM that stands to be wiped from the planet if CARP goes through.
In brief, Wolf FM is a commercial radio station. They play ads and sell ads for their online radio. However, as Steve Wolf (the owner of Wolf FM and quite an incredible man) says running the service costs thousands of dollars per month *just* for the bandwidth. That's not even counting licensing fees.
It's so bad in fact Wolf FM has resorted to asking for donations because companies are not advertising on online radio, even though the response rate per impression is exponentially higher than regular broadcast radio.
This is quite serious for the growing and quite large community of Internet radio. Most broadcasters either use donated bandwidth or take the burden on themselves as a hobby, continually seeing a loss at the expense of operating a world-wide station.
These stations can't live on compliments alone. They are in jeopardy everyday just because of the costs associated with delivering the content. What CARP would do is turn the Internet radio community into exactly what they are trying to prevent - the domain of pirates.
Let's face it, when something costs more than it's actually worth, is in high demand, and is controlled by one source who doesn't bend to the rule of supply and demand, people will resort to other ways of getting it. Suddenly the lines between fair use and illegal copying get blurred, and this is how an industry fails -- or worse, consumer rights get taken away and further restricted (read: the DMCA).
If CARP gets passed, we will see an influx of pirate and distributed services like the many p2p file sharing services. The reputable and legal online stations won't be able to survive and hence they will not be paying their broadcasting dues to organizations like BMI and ASCPI, who actually have moderate pricing that allows online broadcasters to exist.
So the effect of all this will be the artists and distributors loosing money, while creating a brand new pirate industry.
It's sad really, because there is a lot of talent in online radio today and it would be a shame if it all up and vanished, which is what will happen if CARP gets its way.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
There's some really great internet radio out there these days.
Check out http://yp.shoutcast.com/ if you haven't already.
One of my favorites is college comedy talk radio, the one broadcast from indiana.edu, just choose comedy as the genre on the shoutcast page and it's usually several down from the top.
Awesome stuff out there, lets not lose it!
-Malakin
I'm going to lose another karma point for posting this, but thanks for backing me up. It's rediculous. And what's up with this:
"Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "b86c7aa68a0c9066d487324921be3932" and "df0c977b531eb2c6afce1d422b3c6d9b" and (optionally, but preferably) your IP number "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" and your username "kasper37"."
WTF? Excessive bad posting. How 'bout excessive bad moderation.
I've never really understood the point of Internet radio. It seems like a classic example of a "talking dog" product, i.e. it's not that the dog says anything profound or even interesting, but that he can talk at all. Similarly, I think IR is just a novelty that will die off in time, and I honestly think that 99.999% of Internet users won't miss it at all.
Many reasons -
I can listen to any BBC station even though I don't live in England. I can get music that I could never get on radio. I can also listen to old radio programs like Jack Benny... the amount of material is immense.
It's also the easiest way to get music while I'm at work. Just click on a URL... don't need to haul CDs around.
you say you dont like slashdot but you sure do like to post here http://slashdot.org/~Serial%20Troller/
Go find another website
I give the new satellite radio stations a better chance of surviving than internet radio, the problem with internet radio is that it require too many underlying serious infrastructural support to actually work, jeez if I want to list to the radio (FM/AM) I can just buy a cheap receiver for a couple of bucks, put in some lithium batteries and I'm set for months, not Internet connections, Real Play, computer, 24/7 broadband etc...
Lets face it, it's just too complicated that is the problem. Granted for some geeks like myself, who sit in front of there computers almost 18 hours out of any given day, it might make some sense, but people like myself probably only account for about 1.5% of the population.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
about 3 weeks ago. Very sad. Good ideas being squashed by big business.
From what I recall, since the FCC rules on ownership were relaxed a few years ago, almost half of all the radio stations in the US are owned by just two companies. This has caused a homogenization of broadcast radio that makes alternative outlets like the internet that much more desirable. In the home or office, internet radio can compete directly against broadcast without the cost of an FCC licenses. Scary to those who spend millions for those licenses.
I'm curious, does anyone know where Clear Channel and the other big radio companies stand on this issue? I get the feeling they'd be all for charging internet radio up that yazoo...
Internet radio's biggest potential market is the millions of people working at their pc in the office or at home, not, for example, people on the beach. When was the last time you saw people on the beach listening to the radio? Most people I see have portable cd/mp3 players, not radios.
In fact, I would argue that it is traditional radio that has the smaller potential market. Traditional radio is largely relegated to the timeslot which occurs whilst people are in their car or at work places that don't have computers-- and even there, it's my impression people tend to prefer CDs.
You can't argue with choice. Being able to hookup to radio streams from all around the world beats K00L FM any day-- and I spend 10+ hours a day at my computer.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
ok, here's why they won't be adopted, musicians aren't rights activists till after they get famous and their bound by contracts. Second what they hell kind of musician would ever visit a site as dorky as EFF.org, i'm being dead serious, do you guys just not see the problem here!
Photos.
But...what about Internet Radio stations that play copyfree or copy left music ?
If I am forbidden to share copyrighted material on the internet in anyway shape or form, then I'll gladly oblige, the DMCA and it's creators, I'll indulge my sences and satisfy my needs with copyfree or copyleft material.
I'll read material posted freely on the internet .
I shall listen to music created by artists that have not signed deals with the powermad Music industry.
I'll watch films and video produced by copyfree artists on the internet.
And I won't spend a dime on copyrighted materials ever again.
And one day neither will you.
Because one day there won't be ANY copyrighted material available on the internet, AND WE WON'T MISS IT A BIT!
Romana: "How did you know?" Doctor Who: "Ah, well, knowing is easy. Everyone does THAT ad nauseum. I just sort of hope"
There's plenty of free content out there, so why all the fuss? Who says internet radio stations have to play stuff owned by record labels, etc? There are plenty of bands, and even labels, who would gladly give away their stuff for free. Then there's public domain stuff for which the copyrights have expired. Not to mention original material. Quit yer bitchin' and just do it.
How's about we ask Al Gore to shut down the Internet while we watch these DMCA/SSSCA/etc vanish into nothingness. Meanwhile, we'd be running loose on our own Wifi-based supernet, streaming mp3's to hell and back, like the good old days back when we all used WinPlay3 and mpg123 was just a slow flaky bastardized caffeine residue on someone's hard drive.
Or we could just butt heads together and figure out an effective way to fight back (that excludes petitions, they never do shit).
"Would you like to play a game of Global Anti-fascist war ?"
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Gotch'a pad're ... Web-radio ??? Why indeed! 'Cept weenies need a place ta sit while they grope their fav electromechanic blo-up doll.
I know of one station manager in LA who's streaming, but won't post the archives of his most popular shows. He's afraid it will compete with the on-air broadcast. Kind of a no-Tivo policy.
I would have loved web radio back when I lived there... exposure to new types of music. Lovely. A lot of us had shortwave radio, but that was pretty problematic too.
I'm sure people living in some regions of arizona, Nevada, etc feel the same way.
Well Well I think such laws are america centric. what if radio stations open shop in other countries which have different laws? Is there any juristdiction about this in america which can block parts of the world on internet from being viewed by americans?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
The internet views any restriction as an outage, and routes around it.
Day after day, more and more folks here sit and whine about the various "anti-tech" laws and how the rights of the "little guy" are being trampled.
There are (at least) two ways to start doing something about this.
1) become lawyers. IP law and Patent law are in desperate need of folks that have at least a basic understanding of technology.
2) start your own anti-marketing campaigns and product boycotts. This will probably fail since most of you folks that vigorously complained about the blizzard bnetd stuff will probably be buying the upcoming blizzard products and this is indicative of our subculture.
You could always just post here and complain though, whatever works for you.
Cheers,
"nil mortifi sine lucre"
As the DMCA is an American Law, what would happen if they distribute the servers over different nations and continents?
I listen to Digitally Imported Radio at home, school, work, and I know they have multiple servers. Although the majority of them seem to come from europe, etc, what are the ramifications as to the charges if they are not US-Based non-profit organizations/servers?
I know DI is asking for monetary and bandwidth contributions, as their bandwidth is a real b*tch.
On average -- 2000 users @ 16KBps = 31MBps.
I see some server-to-server bandwidth sharing ala p2p, as tonnes of individual servers maybe take 100 or so users. Splits the bandwidth over multiple hosts and multiple locations, and can't be shut down very easily. We're talking something Morpheus-like.
Any thoughts?
This is kind of off topic, but you know, in truth I only listen to normal radio in the car. I wonder, with the increase of cars sporting built in computers/internet, will internet radio find a larger audience? How difficult would it be to build a modem with a soundcard and a crappy LCD panel designed specifically for internet radio? Imagine being able to listen to the same station as you drive from Boston to LA.
Copyright has been a dead issue for a very long time for the music of Beethoven and Bach.
I think the internet is going lead to a mini revolution for traditional music, folk and other music forms that not under the big copyright restrictions of pop and rock.
Artists who do derivative works (like funky remakes of Mozart or the Beattles) will also be more prone to open licenses...since derivative work always gets caught up in fair use copyright litigation.
I listen di.fm as well as smooth jazz and wolf.fm or some industrial (well not so many left:()all the time. depends on my mood i choose between them. good quality, good speed. What will I do without them. they are my radio whatever I do or go.
IE:
Now, after specifying these license terms, these artists and albums then register their music on (insert non-profit group website) so that internet broadcasters can have a searchable index of music to pick from and promote. Note that this is different from the Open Source Music license - it just tells the RIAA goons to get lost, no other rights are modified or given up. Thus, each copyright holder can specify a license overrules the RIAA mandated rates, with the end result that the broadcast law then CEASES TO MATTER, except to the labels who don't get played 'cause they're too damn greedy.
On that note, does anyone know if Shoutcast is going to support "buy" links in their streaming server software? It would really help if we could click a "buy" link on someone's shoutcast server when we hear something we like, that links us to a online MP3 store, or an online CD link.
Duh!
:)
Of course it will survive, maybe not in your godawful country but with shoutcast being free and winamp only a 2mb download away...unless "they" manage to legislate both broadcasting AND listening in every country on the face of the earth listening to radio over the internet is here to stay.
USA - home of the free indeed
many CD's actually:
Underworld, Tosca, Sounds from the Ground, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Boards of Canada
The last time I bought music was like 8 years ago.
These are groups that don't get air time ANYWHERE that I know of. Surely many other people are buying their music BECAUSE of somaFM. My point is that these groups should be supporting (and I bet they would) somaFM's groove salad etc. because it's the only way they become known.
fuck your local radio stations. I can't even listen to the radio anymore.
-metric
Part of what makes RF radio stations economical--and even occasionally profitable--is that the marginal cost of providing the broadcast service to an additional listener is essentially nil, modulo geographic saturation and transmitter power.
Today's streaming media services, however, incur a high marginal cost per additional listener--cost scales linearly with the number of listeners. There have been several attempts (Akamai, RBN) to get listeners to use a "nearby" transmitter, but these only flatten the cost-per-additional-listener line a bit by saving money close to the originating transmitter.
The Internet evolved a more bandwidth- and cost-efficient distribution model years ago in the form of multicast, but it was never widely implemented in enough of the places where it would have made a difference--backbones, routers, terminal servers, DSLAMs, cable companies, etc.
The idea is that a multicast packet stream should have a very small bandwidth footprint for the most expensive parts of the trip from transmitter to the receivers, only needing to be duplicated at the last few legs of the trip, where receivers aren't on the same physical network.
IOW, no matter how many of an ISP's customers are listening to a multicast stream, the ISP only has to transfer the packets from the expensive Internet once, and then make sure they get routed down the cheaper links to those customers who are listening.
Now that NAT is becoming more and more widespread, the situation doesn't look good--but hopefully IPv6 will kill NAT, and improve the multicast situation by opening up a vastly larger range of multicast addresses, and therefore a larger maximum number of simultaneous multicast connections.
Some fun links:
An Introduction to IP Multicast Routing (from Google cache, the site seems to be down)
Some stuff from Cisco
RFC2375: IPv6 Multicast Address Assignments
IPv6 Multicast Standards
Why comply with US laws when one doesn't have to.
Sounds like you need a hug.
{{{ YOU }}}
hth
Personally I'd really like it if SomaFM stuck around. In my old place we had DSL and I spent a lot of time listening to Groove Salad - Soma's chill out station, despite being a rocker. I miss it having only dial-up and home now.
Claric
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know what happened to netradio.net? I used to listen to their stations all the time. I stopped for a bit, and when I tried to go back yesterday I find that they seem to be completely off the air. Even their nameservers aren't up.
That's Drew and Mike. Don and Mike are in that other fucked up loser city.
...there might be more room for stations. But instead they only use the odd frequencies (.3 .5)
etc. In europe you don't have to have such a large physical seperation between transmitters on
say 90.1 and 90.2 as you would if both were on 90.1. So you can squeeze more stations onto the
band. The US/Canadian system is wasteful of bandwidth.
If you all think that these laws just happened to come together to form something inherently evil, you're wrong. This sure seems like a concerted effort to me. Consider this:
* 1996 Telecommunications act makes it possible for radio stations to consolidate.
The effect of this is that in 6 years, 2 large companies own 50% of the radio stations in the country, multiple stations in many markets. And this percentage grows every day. These stations, in order to consolidate operations, have common playlists, and some even broadcast canned programming at night, when advertising dollars are weaker. The consolidation is done to allow the stations to attract national advertising campaigns. It also gives the RIAA a peer to talk with.
In some cases these stations are owned by media conglomerates which also own record labels (Viacom). This fits into the Master Plan -- produce music, get it played on MTV, publicize it in the magazines, get the bands featured on TV shows, and finally play them on the radio. If the music isn't owned by you, only play it if it becomes a major hit.
With this consolidation, the quality of radio plummets. Normally market forces would kick in and upstarts would be created to fill the creative void, giving consumers what they want. But the startup costs for radio stations are immense, and there are limited frequencies. It is not possible for competition to fill the void as quickly as it has been created.
Now the internet comes along and starts to fill the void. If you aren't happy with a radio station in your market, you can listen to a station in a different market. All radio has the potential to become national. Smaller radio stations who play a nice variety of music like this development; if they can prove that they're getting a large national audience, they can attract national advertisers (instead of the local used car lots).
The big radio station companies can't be too happy about this. They have the potential to be scooped by the little guy again. Competition only means headaches for them.
* DCMA/CARP is born. It effectively places huge costs upon people trying to broadcast music on the internet. These costs can't possibly be recouped -- they are higher than costs put on broadcast stations, and they are in addition to the publisher fees that broadcast stations pay.
Oddly enough, the money goes to the record companies (not to the artists), giving the large conglomerates a huge advantage, because they're going to be paying themselves...
This sounds like anti-trust at its finest. The large media companies become 1000-pound gorillias primarily through laws passed through Congress, and these laws, although written generically, require payments which wind up in the pocket of the gorillas. So the gorillas get fatter and the small companies get bled dry.
The laws that have been created do exactly what they were intended to do -- they squash the little guys who have the potential to upset the apple card, they lock up the content with the large media conglomerates (who will just get larger), and they reduce the choices of the consumer (which cuts costs for them, because if you have to choose between Britney Spears and 100 other artists, chances are you won't choose Britney, but if your choice is between Britney and 4 other artists, you have a 20% chance of choosing Britney).
I wouldn't be surprised if, when the conglomerates own most of the stations in the country, that they introduce these new fees onto radio, with the claim that "the internet has these fees, why shouldn't broadcast radio", effectively locking the music market for good.
And this is all paid for by us. We pay extra money so that the conglomerates can bribe the Government.
Ralph
Cause i dont want to pack a real radio in to work. nor do i want to start packing CDs into work. and i dont have time at work to be looking for MP3s. Shoutcast is all i got in my boring day of cube life. thank god its only part time.
Now really, how disingenuous! Are they aribtrating copyrights? NO. The terms of the copyrights are already set in law. What they are arbitrating is the royalties to be paid on copyrighted material.
But I guess they wouldn't want to just come right out and call it what we all know it actually is.
CRAP.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
CARP is just shooting themselves in their foot, simple. CARP is headed by a bunch of outdated executives that are interested in finding new ways of funding their Mercedes and BMWs. They sat around and watched this internet radio thing and just knew that it would never go anywhere. Here we are now a few years later it's slowly fasing out terrestrial radio and they realize that they don't have 100% control over it. They got outsmarted and let a new technology pass them right by and all they can do now is put in laws that will whipe out but a few corporate webcast stations, of course ones that they control.
;)
I myself run a small station and thanks to it, many people around the world are able to listen and experience music that they would have never otherwise been able to. That's the essence of webcasting.
Webcasting will never die, it will just move to an underground thing thanks to new technologies like multicasting
I'm a DJ at KALX Berkeley 90.7FM, a UC Berkeley-run college radio station. Because of certian provisions in the DMCA, our Internet stream, among many other college stations' streams will be forced to shut down since we won't be able to pay the Record companies for _every_ song we have played, retroactively, since our stream first went up two years ago.. I really REALLY hate the DMCA... Check out our website http://kalx.berkeley.edu and check out the "Save Our Streams" link for more details and an online petition.
I find it getting more and more crazy every day. The problem is, just like in really life, people fear what they do not undersatnd and the Internet for a lot of people out there, they do not get what the Internet is good for and they just point out what all it is bad for. and what they are saying is bad, is not bad if they really look at what is going on, and what is happening because of it. Like with the RIAA and Napster, slaes go up when Napster is running, you shut them down because people can download the music, and then your slaes go back to what they were before Napster and you are still mad saying that it is all the other file sharing apps out there still. I still take the point of view that the Internet is a big network, that is open for any one to share and exchagne information openly with who every they want. The Internet can not the filed under normal Laws that work/don't work for the real world. This is a difrent place, and it is made totaly difrent. The difrence is also that the people with power in the real world do not have all that power on the Inernet. On the Internet the people have more power then the big companies and that bug, and lets fear set in. This then kicks in we better shut them down, so that we can silnce there voice, but on the Internet one voice only takes seconds to get around the world, and get peopel to see that they may be right. The Internet needs no laws to it, if you leave your system open to hacks, because you did not fix bugs, then shame on you for not fixing them. All I am trying to say is that the Internet should be open, and you should not have to worry about what you are doing is leagel or not, or if you have to worry about some one coming and beatting down your door.
It's not just perfection, it's reproduceability. I can make a perfect copy of a lossy mp3, but I can only make a good copy of a perfect tape. And the copy of the copy is of lesser quality still. So if there's no degradation, there's no reason to buy another version from them. And despite the fact that MP3s are, technically, lossy, a well-encoded MP3 is all but indistinguishable from a CD. So if you can make a perfect copy of that MP3 ad infinitum, you are depriving the RIAA their right, which is that since they own the copyright, they should be able to provide you with that music. This has all been discussed a thousand times, but if you're going to rehash that side, I may as well put this side up for show.
Synergy is your friend
now, i realize im posting a bit late and probably no one will read this, but, how will this effect XM radio. i realize it is subscription based, but doesnt XM promise cd quality misic? to me, that means perfect (if not prefect, better than an internet radio station broadcasting on a 28.8 k stream...or even at a 56 kstream for that matter). does the subscription cost cover the CRAP...er...CARP ruling? or maybe im all wrong in assuming that this new-fangeled satalite radio thing falls under the DMCA and CARP. does CARP effect the broadcaster, the satalite, or the reciever? does it effect all three? if so, if they can bring a satalite in to this mess, how far out there can this go? will this mean that if the SETI people ever get an answer, are they allowed to translate (decode) it without federal penalties? or am i just out of my goard?
"Alot of people don't know what they are doing...and most are pretty good at it." -George Carlin
in our society. I have even seen a few admit as
much.
and the music industry is gouging consumers.
Didn't they get caught for overcharging consumers
over a 15 year period?
Yes. they did.
A new model that means less money for Big Stars
and less for obsoleted middlemen distributors
will do the rest of us, just fine.
The music industry has poured out a torrent of
verbiage on the subject.
But two works put it in perspective:
Chicken Litte.
First:
To everybody that serves copyrighted music: start introducing free music _right now_. As it seems from what I read here, there's no shortage of it.
Eventually, you may get rid of all pay-to-play music and get "free samples" like doctors get from medicine labs.
Second:
Google or Alltheweb could create a free radio search (ok, text search exists now). You could hover your mouse over a link and get a cached sample of the radios's music, whatever.
Third:
Is there a place where I can get a playlist with free radios for xmms? This would be great (maybe it could be paid with ads). I would even find it valid to have ads in the xmms player itself (like in Opera).
Fourth:
An important part of what we hear is not just music. Some radios, like "The Linux Show" have only "comment round-tables", much like those professional sports commentators do. This is somewhat more difficult, though -- English is not easy for everyone. Try an Esperanto version -- it has a far more regular pronunciation.
We have offshore tax havens, why not offshore RIAA/MPAA/DMCA havens? What's to stop a broadcaster in Russia or China from broadcasting American content to Americans?
Listen to the Hal Turner Radio show at www.halturnershow.com. This radio program is taking the world by storm. The website gets more traffic than foxnews.com.
There's a lot of information at saveinternetradio.org. you should take the time to educate yourselves on the issue. I personally run a shoutcast server for my site at slackersunion.org that's absolutely nothing but heavy metal, and although it only gets between 5 and 20 listeners a day, it's in danger of getting shut down because of this whole issue. There's no provision in any of this mess for the "amature" broadcaster or hobbyist, like myself. Ultimately, it's us little people that get screwed. Check out the site and help in the fight. -Phil
To avoid corruption, one must remain dishonest.
I doubt the oil producing countries do.
Embargo us will you? I don't think so *CLICK*
Good point. One small nit to consider. There's the small matter of the consumer opting *out* of whatever scheme they come up with. If the choice between music the conglomo way or simply not listening to what they're offering, people would choose the latter. Also their scheme isn't airtight. No one can own the entire music scene. So unless gestapo tactics can be used. Listen to unapproved music, go to jail. There scheme will fail, and very badly at that.
With the CARP ruling, I am disgusted. How do they plan to retrieve these funds, and make sure things are correct? How can you invade online people's privacy with requiring them to fill out tons of information just to listen to your webstation? Traditional radio doesn't have this. Neither should Internet radio. This is a ploy to kill off all the webcasting business so that they can have their own sites to DOWNLOAD MUSIC from. What they fail to realize is, Internet radio is not Napster. We PROMOTE artists by playing their music. This in turn, sales CD's. Is the RIAA so blind as to not be able to seperate File Sharing vs. Internet Radio? Japan-A-Radio doesn't play any U.S. Artists. All of the music is foreign from Japan, with exception of a few remixes. Does this CARP ruling come down on a station like this? How would it affect us, who primarily does not play RIAA music?
I'm very disappointed in Hilary Rosen, and the entire RIAA group. They started out as a standards group. Now that they don't have any standards that they maintain like they did with the actual vinyl records, they're hurting for money, because they didn't keep up with the times and technology.. Whose fault is that? That is the RIAA's fault. That is why they've lost money. Trying to extort people for your mistakes is wrong, dishonorable, and foolish. You shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you, RIAA. That's right. We FEED you. We buy your artists' products, therefore, payment goes to you, which is distributed through out all of the people at RIAA who drives around in brand new Mercedes vehicles and probably has families of their own. Are you really willing to rob Peter to pay Paul? Are you willing to steal from their children's mouths because you are so greedy to live your 'lush' lifestyle that you do not want to change? RIAA. It's over. You're going to lose either way. Stop fighting. You're only making it harder for yourself.
masa
administrator;
Japan-A-Radio
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Opinions expressed in this email are mine, and are not necessarily the opinion of Japan-A-Radio.