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

How can internet radio survive?

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

With the downfall of internet banner ad sales that accompanied the burst of the dot-com bubble, it seems that no one running a serious venture on the internet can break even, much less make a profit.

My question is, how can you keep running indefinitely without any commercials during your audio streams? My understanding is that this is the bread and butter of more conventional radio stations, so how do things work with your company? Surely someone has to pay the hosting and bandwidth bills sooner or later.

Also, I'm wondering if the recent actions by the RIAA scare you, even a little? While shooting and killing college students in a raid on MP3 servers is definitely unprecedented, I wasn't entirely surprised when I read it. It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose. So how do you deal with copyright and licensing problems, and what is your company's view on the whole intellectual property situation that seems to come up every time media on the internet is discussed?