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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
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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're right, of course.
Keep in mind, though, that large sections of the world do not have a copyright system for music like ours, or do not enforce it at all. From what I understand, many parts of China and Eastern Europe have open bazaars where music is sold in open markets on burned CD's. I would not be surprised if those areas become known as hotbeds of artistic activity, and give birth to innovative new economic models for music distribution.
Despite pressure from the U.S. gov't, I don't see China or the Russian Federation going to great lengths to enforce U.S. copyright laws for the benefit of the RIAA.
So, we can wallow in our own litigious culture of red tape in the U.S., but in the meantime other countries across the globe are conducting an economic experiment which may make us look stupid, and force us to rethink our approach.
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.
Same here ... just *shit* on the radio, thank god or allah or budah or whoever for the NPR classical music show ...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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
Not to mention, eventually computers will just cost $2.25.
if things go the way they seem to be you won't be able to buy a computer, but you might be able to buy an SSSCA/CDBWHATEVERITSCALLEDNOW crippled webradio-a-tron for $2.25*
*initial outlay only, music available to approved applicants.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Internet radio is the only way to get something resembling choice nowadays. Let's take Des Moines, where I live as an example: the "Des Moines Radio Group" owns six radio stations; Clear Channel Communications owns five; Two Rivers Broadcasting owns three. That's pretty much all there is in the way of commercial broadcasting--the last good commercial station in Des Moines, KFMG, went under around 1996, replaced by KAZR, a station by and for people who think a guitar is a penis substitute and who proudly display their playlist on their web site: all thirteen songs of it.
KUNI is the best station around these parts. It's based in eastern Iowa, and all we have here is a low-power translator that's easily overwhelmed by skip in the summer and the far more powerful transmitters of nearby commercial FM stations the rest of the time--most FM radios have the selectivity and capture ratio of a dead crab, which doesn't help. I'm stuck in a basement condo and hence can't get a decent antenna going.
Internet radio is the only way to get anything decent around here--and as a fine example of that, I'd point everybody at BeOS Radio, which plays a wide variety of music, running on submissions of only original works and original performances of works in the public domain.
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.
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
As the DMCA is an American Law, what would happen if they distribute the servers over different nations and continents?
The US will lean on the rest of the world to pass similar laws in the name of "globalization" and "harmonization". They will also lean on their allies to do so out of "friendship". Against any militarily weak nation they could threaten military action. (The covert CIA kind, rather the the B52 bombers on CNN kind though.)
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?
What probably matters is not if these organisations make a profit or not. But if there is a potential that they might reduce the profits of US "high^H^H^H^Hcorporate citizens".
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.
You need to do this server switching without obvious glitches and you need some way to distribute to the servers...
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.
Uh. It is retroactive to the point the DMCA was enacted. The fees agreed to at the end of February applied retroactively to 1998. CARP is now in the process of determining the fees from then to the present.
The smaller stations already do get a break in the CARP recommendation. There are different rates for simultaneous broadcast users, non-profit broadcasters such as college radio and internet only broadcasters.
I suggest you read up a bit more on CARP before making such basic erroneous statements. Nothing personal, but your comments have been addressed in nearly every article I have seen on this topic.
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.
You need a computer: Something you already own.
You need bandwidth: Something you already own.
I guess I don't see the problem here? It's not like some company is saying, "Hey, we have this great radio station, just $1500 for the hardware and $40 per month and you, too, can listen!" You already own the equipment for other uses so the cost to tune in is zero.
As for why? Everyone else has already illustrated that for you: Local stations suck. They're controlled by megacorps and you're only allowed to hear what they want you to hear. I listen to SomaFM - in fact, I've got a listing of a dozen or so favorite Internet radio stations on a touchscreen in my living room and I can tune in to any just by tapping the icon. We have people over for dinner and they go, "Wow, this is some great music. What station is this? I've never heard this before!"
People are sick and f'ing tired of the typical garbage and want something new. If you've got a broadband connection, Internet radio delivers that.
I personally hope some of these operations move offshore and tell the RIAA to go f themselves. I've listened to Internet radio stations all over the world; what's to stop someone like somaFM from throwing up a server in another country and streaming the same stuff?
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Actually WTVN is Talk Radio and they have alot of local talent. SO far they are not replacing a bunch of shows with syndicated crap. John Corby, the afternoon dirve time host is the greatest. Gives me something to laugh at when I am on the way home. The guy after him, Sterling from 7 to 10 is pretty good also then there's the king of late night, Steve "Boom Boom" Cannon. Yeah I know, even I get tired of talk radio sometimes, but talk radio is the closest thing to Geeks in Space on normal radio. Plus John has the Big Bass Brothers restaurant reviews every Friday at 6. I find lots of places to eat from that that are not a chain store, that have good food and lots of it for not very much money. One restaurant called the Ohio Deli has a Dagwood sandwich that is HUGE and only costs a bit over 5 bucks. So, no, not ALL Clear Channel stations sound the same. Since Clear Channel has bought both WTVN and WNCI in the Columbus area, they have pretty much left things alone (except the weekends are getting more automated). Granted, NCI is top 40, so you hear alot of N'sync and Britney on it, but there's occasionally a good song being played and I only listen during the Morning Zoo anyway. They don't play music! :) Well, at least what I would call music....one parody song that have is called Osama Farted. Hilarious!
Gorkman
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?