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."

Comments

ask JWZ

[quannump]

dont' ask me if internet radio can survive, read a rant by JWZ.

They are already paying all the fees

[ratajik]

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.

Survival in a pool of acid

[hyrdra]

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.