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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."
as crooked energy trading companies!
Tcd004
Because Internet Radio has music formats that aren't available over the airwaves where many people live. Where I live there is only one radio station that plays the music I like, and they have 20 minute commercial breaks, ugh. So I tune to the net and have exponentially more choices.
Internet radio is nice to have in places where a stereo system would be overkill. It allows you to *gasp* multi-task!
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?
Um, all the stations in my area (near two major metro markets) play commercial crap music. It's all really, really bad. I listen to experimental hip-hop, IDM and drum & bass all day on the Internet while I work. There's nothing like that on my FM dial. Radio sucks. My $2.25 radio is worthless to me. You want it?
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
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.
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
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.
Excuse me? Do you instantly get modded up if you mention some sort of open license be it the GPL or this OAL?
Is this guy serious? Does he think that artist will sacrifice royalties and instead try to make a living by being on the road for all the months of the year that they aren't in the studio. Sorry I just don't see this happening at all for one major reason: royalties mean that a few months of work in the studio will continue to pay for years to come. It has worked for ages and will continue to work.
Mod me down if you must but I just though a bit of common sense needed to be thrown in.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
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?
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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