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Internet Radio Day of Silence
headless_ringmaster writes "TechTV's ScreenSavers today aired their interview with Wolf FM's Steve Wolf on the CARP bill and how it'll destroy Internet Radio. The Internet Radio Day of Silence is a day of protest for Internet Radio stations to get the word out on the issue. This has been talked about on /. before, but it's very nice to see a significant television/media company like TechTV use their broadcasting advantage to help the little guys, especially when they're up against monied interests." May 1 is Labor Day throughout most of the world except the U.S.; a good choice for internet radio stations to try to get out their message.
The Internet Radio Day of Silence is a day of protest for Internet Radio stations to get the word out on the issue.
Wait, you get the word out with silence? :) </lameness>
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
Basically, it's good to see mainstream coverage for this story.
Net Radio Fears Heard in Congress
Yahoo writeup showing that we just might make a difference.
USAToday Coverage!!! Suave!!!
Most importantly, A sample letter to your congressman.
Of course, all courtesy of SOMAFM, my favorite internet radio group.
My fave is Groove Salad (128k pls feed)
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
In fact, it will be observing a number of days of silence... quite a number so far.
BTW: Props to michael for the Simon & Garfunkel reference too.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
From what I understand, according to this bill/law/whatever, you're supposed to pay a fee o RIAA for the songs you're playing PER listener. Which makes up for a killer amount of money if you look at stations like DIGITALLY IMPORTED. What I don't understand is, are you supposed to pay a fee to RIAA, even though you're playing music from INDEPENDENT LABELS ONLY ?
I'm asking this because I've been vising the homepages of some internet radio stations that do not depend on RIAA as the "content provider" of their music, but rather play music created by indepandant artists. Yet, all of them seem to be worried about this law. Anyone cares to elaborate ?
Recently in my school newspaper, there was an article detailing how laws such as the DMCA and other copyright "protection" laws have been making our campus radio station doubt whether it can continue it's online broadcast. We were informed that we would need to buy new hardware and software to monitor what songs were being played and how often, as well as how frequentlty they were aired. They also said that due to certain legislation we would not be able to play whole albums on the air, or multiple songs by the same artist. All in all it was said that we would need to pay back fees (royalties? i'm not sure) somewhere to the tune of $4000, just to keep our internet broadcast up.
i don't know about you, but i think this is a bunch of crap and is limiting the expression of our student body as well as keeping us from using new technology. (being that we're a well known Tech/ Engineering school, you might expect us to do stuff like this.)
oh well thats just my 2 cents.
i could understand some sort of logical fee arrangement but they are asking internet broadcaster to pay double the rate of terrestrial based radio stations.
i would imagine if they tried to charge these fees of thoose land based stations there would be a huge fit (and many of them out of business shortly)... but since it's the internet the RIAA has to be "tough"
Normal radio stations aren't charged per listener, simply because you can't count listeners. I'm not sure about fancy satellite radio and stuff like that, though.
incorrect. taken from this article (and many others if you Google a bit)
Goldsmith's dream could be short-lived, however. On Feb. 20, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), a body appointed by the U.S. Copyright Office, ruled that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet radio stations must pay the record labels a fee of 0.14 cents per song, per listener. Traditional radio stations would pay 0.07 cents per song, per listener
they do pay fees, just half that of whats being asked of internet radio
Save Internet Radio is a great website, there's lots of information on the bills that are threatening internet radio, and what you can do to help stop them from passing legislation.
That is the problem with this proposal. AM or FM only Radio stations don't pay this fee.
AM or FM Radio stations that also simulcast on the Internet will pay 0.07 cents per song per listener.
Internet only radio pays twice that fee.
That may not sound like much but do the math. Wolffm will owe $500,000 as soon as this goes into effect. The rate is retroactive.
Netradio liquidated as soon as they heard about this proposal.
This was pushed by the big companies trying to make sure you hear the music in which they have an investment.
Internet broadcasters stations should be subject to the same royalties and restrictions as any other broadcaster. At lest those that are not from the FCC, since no public airwaves are used here. If a radio station has to pay $1000 for an album to be able to play it any time they want in a public forum, then Inet broadcasters should have the same fee.
I think artists/performers/producers do have a right to control their artistic and intellectual property. I don't think the politicians should keep passing bad laws based on information gleened from over-paid lobbyests.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
As General Manager of a small college radio station, here in Binghamton, NY I know a lot of people outside of our listening area depend on our RealAudio feed to get alternative news, music, and opinions. While it might piss them off that we're participating in the Internet Radio Day of Silence, it might make them angry enough to get involved. We have cut our feed and will be running Public Service Announcements on the air to get the word out. It's unfortunate that if CARP's decision goes through, we'll have to pull our Internet Feed. Small stations like ours (broadcast or just Internet) can't afford the high royalties. We already pay ASCAP and BMI, shouldn't that be enough!?
[shameless plug]
Don't let that stop you from tuning in *after* May 1st though!!
[/shameless plug]
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
From http://www.saveinternetradio.org/pressroom.asp
HISTORICAL NOTE : Over-the-air radio stations have historically had to pay royalties to composers (in total, about 3% of revenues, via ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC), but not to the record companies or artists, as Congress felt that those parties benefitted sufficiently from the promotional value of radio airplay.
They will not pay this fee. If they did then payments to the RIAA from broadcasters would total $3.3 BILLION and this is even ignoring ignoring overnight.
It's May 1. And, SomaFM is still broadcasting.
I don't know if they're supporting the Day of Silence, but every 30 minutes, a short advertisement comes on the air. It always says something to effect of "The RIAA is trying to exercise its control over internet radio. Stop them before you can't hear your favourite artists, again." And, the ad is right. Forcing fees on already underfunded radio stations is terrible for the future of music.
Some of the lesser-known ambient music artists, for example, *ONLY* have their music played on SomaFM. What happens when SomaFM can't afford to keep their station anymore? I call it a tragedy. Call it whatever you want. Either way, it sucks. For us and for them.
Groove Salad.
What's to keep mimes from capturing the music stream, burning mp3's of it, and then sharing it on KaZaA? Until we can eliminate piracy of silence, I seriously doubt we'll get the record industry to shut up.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I took the DNA Lounge webcast and archives down for the day, as well as the audio portion of the video webcast. Well actually I replaced it with a synthesized voice explaining why there's no music. If you run your own webcast, I hope you'll do something similar, to help shake the listeners into action.
I've written up an explanation of how the webcasting rules currently work, and how they will work if the CARP crap goes through. The whole situation is fairly egregious, and shafts the small operator far more than it will affect the major corporations who are able to play in the same sandbox as the Big Five who control 90%+ of the global entertainment industry.
This is all about legislating the internet out of existence, to preserve their previous and now-obsolete business model.
Under the new rules, if a webcast had only a single listener -- the webcaster -- he would be expected to pay $184/year for streaming music to himself!
What is the problem ? Why do slashdot users keep promoting commercial music and ignoring the free multimedia scene (scene.org) :-) ? Try scenemusic.net which has a playlist of 9095 free mp3s. You can actually download the
source code to most of the music (.mod, .xm etc.). Commercial netradios could also learn from it's advanced request and comment
system.
Who's brilliant idea was it not to broadcast for a day in protest? Internet radio stations are up and down so much that no one is likely to even question why. It's not like a major TV station like CNN going offline for 24 hours. Most people are going to just move on to the next net radio station or pop in a CD.
What they SHOULD have done was to run a continuously looping 30-second spot telling everyone WHY their programming was interrupted and WHAT they wanted the listener to do.
Congrats, you just wasted a day of valuable broadcast time.
KCRW is observing the silence, which should be VERY good publicity, since they are a VERY big market in LA (for a public radio station) and get pretty good ratings during drive time hours.
Here's the "To the Point" episode talking about it.
Fact: The per song per listener fee for every song an internet radio station plays is 0.14 cents.
Fact: The RIAA is seeking 3 year's retroactive payments from each broadcasting radio station.
Now let's do the math for my personal favorite internet radio station Digitally Imported. Currently they peak at around 6000 listeners, so let's assume an average of 5000 listeners for a 24 hour period. Given the fact that the mainly play trance/house/eurodance music let's also assume that they can play about 6 songs per hour (at the extreme end of the lengths of said tracks). The total cost to the RIAA per year to run this station follows:
total_fee = (number of listeners)(proposed fee)(songs per hour)(8760 hours per year)
total_fee = (5000 listeners)($0.0014)(6 songs)(8760) = $367,920!!!
Furthermore, take into account the retroactive payments. Assuming the station even started at 0 listeners 3 years ago and grew in a linear fashion (Gaining 1667 listeners per year) the total retroactive payments come to:
retro_fee = ($73.58)(1667) + ($73.58)(3333) + ($73.58)(5000) = $735,800!!!
As far as I know, almost all independant broadcasters cannot even afford the yearly fees, let alone this outrageous yearly fee. It's simple math that can't be argued with. When the guy who ran Digitally Imported needed donations to upgrade the server that streamed the music, he was lucky to receive $3,000 over 3 weeks.
For the love of God, at least charge a lower rate or go to a profit percentage method of payment. Most webasters that I know of have no problem with these proposals, but they have been constantly rejected by the CARP commission.
To cover these yearly costs if the stationed turned to a subscription-based system, that would require the listeners to pay $80.00 a year to listen to something that is basically being offered for free as a labor of love by the creator. Now consider that FM radio is free. That would drive more listeners to the crappy cookie-cutter top-10 wasteland that is FM brodcast radio. Whose thumb is held very prominently over this media outlet? The RIAA. Is it any wonder now why they're pushing for such high fees? Drive out the internet radio stations, drive more listeners to their crappy stations, possibly boost their revenue. It's important that we think about these issues when they arrise as the big ten of the media are basically trying to dictate to us what we should and should not be able to use to entertain ourselves. So please, speak out. Raise your voice. Be heard. Thank you for listening to my thoughts on this subject.
For more information on this subject please tune into WolfFM. They are holding an excellent all-day live information broadcast on the topic at hand.