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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?
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
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!--
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
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.
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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Just what is "the competitor" for any given type of music, anyway? I probably listen to music in the context of friends and acquaintances who share knowledge and appreciation of it.
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
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.