Ask the Honcho of Internet Radio's SomaFM

This week, Rusty, the general manager of Internet Radio's SomaFM, is the subject of the Slashdot Interview Spotlight. Some of you may remember Rusty from a recent Salon interview. Now he's making himself available to Slashdot and I'm sure you all can figure out a few questions to ask that weren't covered before. I'm sure many of you have questions about CARP, the future of Internet Radio, and the technology behind it. So let's get to it! As usual, we'll send off the 10 highest moderated questions on to Rusty, and we hope to have the answers for you sometime next week. <PLUG TYPE=SHAMELESS>BTW - If you haven't checked out the streams available at SomaFM, give it a try. Taste the Groove Salad, and the other 8 commercial free streams available on SomaFM. Ah, if only normal FM radio could be this good!</PLUG>

Comments

Re:Money

[kwerle]

Dude, from http://www.somafm.com/ Yeah, the main page:

"SomaFM is commercial free and supported entirely by our listeners. Bandwidth is expensive! Your donation of any amount helps us stay on the air, providing commercial free music that can't be found anywhere else. Thanks!"

Right next to the PayPal and Amazon Honor System links...

real comment

[trefoil]

Internet radio is alive in my local city. For a while, it seemed that it was going to die, due to the regulations being handed down. Advertisers were getting upset and the ilk, so for a while, they stopped broadcasting. Then a few months ago, they came back online, but without the regional advertising. Only the national station advertising was ever on during the commercial breaks, and during the rest, it'd just be silence.
An example of this is at: http://z100portland.com/ (top 40 station)

Re:What am I missing?

[Otter]

Answering my own question:
Reading a little more on this, I found a link to this NYT article, which is a lot more persuasive for being a lot less alarmist and greedy than most of the IP-related stuff that gets linked around here:

In a 1998 copyright law, Congress gave Webcasters an automatic license to stream copyrighted music so long as they paid a royalty fee to be agreed on later. Like broadcast radio stations, Webcasters already pay about 4 percent of their revenue to compensate composers and music publishers. But American broadcasters have never paid a royalty for using sound recordings, which are typically owned by a record label, successfully arguing that record labels are already compensated by the promotional benefits of having their music played over the air.

Webcasters argue that the recording industry should recognize that it derives a similar benefit from music that is streamed over the Internet. In an arbitration panel proceeding supervised by the copyright office, the Webcasters proposed a royalty rate about equal to those paid to composers and publishers, 5 percent of revenue. The recording industry asked for 15 percent of revenue, or a comparable per-performance fee.

In February, the arbitration panel proposed a formula of 0.0014 cent per song, per listener. Conventional broadcasters who stream simultaneously on the Internet would pay half that rate. The rate falls between what the two sides asked for. But because there is no option to pay a percentage of revenue, and because so few Webcasters are making money on advertising, it works out in some cases to far more than a station's total revenue.

OK, that makes a lot more sense. Editors and submitters -- you'd make better advocates by linking to something like this instead of to rabid, partisan pieces like the CARP link in this story.

kexp Radio

[cheinonen]

If you want commercial free (basically), FM radio, try out kexp.org. Also 90.3 FM up in Seattle, they have multiple streaming options (56k and 96k mp3, Real Audio, and even a 1.4 Mb uncompressed WMA stream), live playlists, and a really diverse music selection.

They are paid for my sponsorship drives, like public television, but also supported by the Experience Music Project up here (note: EMP is a project of Paul Allen as well, so the station basically exists thanks to all that Microsoft money that Allen has). They also take song requests from people continaully, and it's introduced me to lots of bands that I otherwise never would have heard on most commercial radio, or even most streaming internet radio.

Re:BBC radio 6.

[Anonymous Coward]

And see here for Radio 1, Radio 4 and Radio 6 in OGG format (better quality and no annoying realplayer).