Day of Silence On the Internet

A number of readers sent in stories about Net radio going dark for a day. Not all of it, but according to the Globe and Mail at least 45 stations representing thousands of channels. The stations are protesting a ruling establishing royalty rates that will put most of them out of business on July 15. "The ruling... is expected to cost large webcasters such as Yahoo and Real Networks millions of dollars, drive smaller websites like Pandora.com and Live365.com out of business and leave a large chunk of the 72 million Net radio listeners in the dark." SaveNetRadio has a page where US residents can locate their senators and representatives to call them today.

Comments

How about a day of EXPLANATION?!?!

[elrous0]

I am a geek, net-literate guy who is TOTALLY lost on this whole issue. I've tried following it, and it's as confusing and muddy as the "net neutrality" issue. Even the debates about it I've seen have been obtuse and confusing.

Is this the result of a ruling, a law, or a company decision? Who exactly has to pay and who doesn't? What do they have to pay? Why do they have to pay it? To whom do they pay it, and why them? Where they paying before? Is it a matter of amount or are they challenging having to pay at all?

Re:How about a day of EXPLANATION?!?!

[squiggleslash]

Not sure if it is or not, but it is perfectly possible for copyright holders to bypass SoundExchange and negotiate (lower) royalty rates directly with the Internet Radio stations.

And that, friends, is ultimately the solution. If Internet Radio stations would just drop music that hasn't been made available to them at reasonable, practical, rates then (a) they'll continue to survive and (b) SoundExchange will need to review its rates or face oblivion. The only way it would benefit SoundExchange and its members to continue to charge high rates is if they don't want their music played on Internet Radio stations at all.

The real question here is why the various groups representing Internet Radio aren't doing this.

Re:How about a day of EXPLANATION?!?!

[smellsofbikes]

The one I listen to the most -- radio1190.org, I believe they webcast -- has like 5000 watts of power to the transmitter during the day (compared to 50,000-100,000W on the commercial ones around here) and because of some weird regulation, they drop down to 100W, yes one hundred, after dark. And it's AM so it's all crackly. But that's okay: it sounds a little like old vinyl and it's the weirdest stuff.

For the record, groups I've found because of them, that I recommend: Sigur Ros, Mogwai, Electralane, Rasputina, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, 16Horsepower, Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian, Black Heart Procession, God Speed You Black Emperor, Boards Of Canada, Beauty's Confusion, Death In Vegas, Jane Jensen, Xenofobix, Karsh Kale, Underworld, among many others. Plus, they were playing Modest Mouse 7 years ago. Ditto Gogol Bordello. They were playing Arcade Fire two weeks after their first album came out.

You have to sift through a lot of junk -- which is one of the useful things that eg Clear Channel does -- but on the other hand, you find a bunch of stuff that you, personally, think is just wonderful, that many other people wouldn't, which is why the big stations don't play it. They're least-common-denominator, and piddly little 5000W stations can play two hours of '70's funk or have a whole show just doing trip-hop and succeed.

Which, by the way, is why I think there's widespread corporate opposition to internet radio: it fragments the user base because everyone is off listening to the stuff they REALLY LOVE rather than the broad-market swill, but there isn't enough money in any of those little tiny markets to fuel up the advertising juggernaut that corporations love so much.

Re:How about a day of EXPLANATION?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be them, or it could be the recording industry.

I see this as just an extension of their war against file sharing. They've never cared about piracy from the standpoint of people getting their content for free. That's just their public justification for their actions. What they've cared about all along is maintaining their monopoly on the distribution of music. P2P goes around that monopoly and allows unsigned artists to distribute their content to listeners without buying into the losing proposition of signing a recording contract.

Internet radio also goes around this distribution mechanism and allows artists to reach their fans without being a signed by a label. Internet radio is perhaps an even better means of this than P2P is since the burden of finding artists shifts from the listener to the broadcaster. Listeners simply choose the station that best represents their tastes. And because broadcasters aren't limited to people living in any one place like traditional radio is, they can cater to more eclectic tastes and still find enough listeners to do well.

The RIAA knows how to control terrestrial radio. Even without official payola, they've managed to ensure that almost every station with an official FCC license broadcasts the stuff they want broadcast. Traditional radio is free advertising for them. Internet radio cannot be similarly controlled. And that's why they want it shut down.

Re:How about a day of EXPLANATION?!?!

[malkavian]

That's the model for Terrestrial Broadcast, where you have a limited geographical catchment.
Internet Radio.. Well, I'm sure that there's a few million pretty eclectically oriented people out there that'll match your music tastes exactly.. Maybe just a few tens of thousands in the world.. But that's enough to keep a small radio station going.

Who knows, that could slowly grow to be the next "Popular Music" in time. Every popular 'Formula' expires in time. Then it's up for grabs who engineers the next one.

Given enough groups of 'eclectic', small stations that serve a few tens of thousands, there's a good chance that one of those will hit the next 'magic formula' that could well knock the current record labels on their behinds. Stuck on the outside of the next "Rock and Roll" as the younger business model steam rollers them into history.
And being as they're broadcasting on the net.. They can reach the world, not just a hundred miles or so from their broadcasting station.

Personally, I'm all for a small station that fits my needs.. I no longer listen to the 'big boys' as they just don't cater to what I like.. It'd be refreshing to hear new, good stuff rather than listen to my existing collection over and over again..

Re:How about a day of EXPLANATION?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but I never have, and never will, buy the 'go to a concert, buy a tshirt instead' argument. You may not have stated it explicitly, but it is implicitly present.

There are a non-trivial number of musicians that have no interest in those pursuits, and this argument essentially invalidates the worth of their musical product to begin with. Hell, if tshirts sell that well, why not become a tshirt designer instead? With no music, there's no supporting merchandise.

Additionally, I would wager that less than 5% of a typical person's musical intake will be at a concert. We all have iPods; it's no secret that music is more personalized and local now than ever before - touring / physical resources are finite, whereas digital distribution is nearly infinite. If someone writes a great song, I would like to think that the reward is greater than their means to physically recoup that reward.

Just my two cents, but for those of us that slave away for days/weeks/months on music without a means to tour nor merchandise, I find it a little insulting that I should implicitly deserve less than someone who does, when the real focus should be on the music. The last thing I want to do after finishing a song or album is think 'What graphic T will best sell my music?'

This sucks.

[rmadmin]

Ya know, this sucks so bad that I had to torrent some music at work to listen to since I didn't have my streams. :(

Re:This sucks.

[megaditto]

Or how about trying to listen to non-RIAA music? There are plenty of third party recordings that are made available for free or almost for free to anyone directly by artists, performers, even some record companies. Lots of classical pieces performed by the universities' choirs and orchestras are put out there for free

While I sympathize with you, you don't exactly have the rights to listen to music for free unless the copyright holder gives it to you. If you don't like it, you can get back at them by not paying attention to their crap, and actually supporting their competitors.

Re:Non-American listeners?

[tedshultz]

Is there anything we can do if we live outside of the USA? Will our voice/concerns even matter? We want to help in any way we can if it's all at possible. It's just about as easy to influence US politics if you live in the US or not, just give money to groups you support. Because the US is such a large world power (for better or worse), I'm surprised that more foreign groups are not more active in US politics.

Re:News Coverage

[another_fanboy]

Is there any way we could contact our regular Radio & Local News stations and raise awareness of this issue?
The local stations may not care or may even be supportive of the bans seeing as internet radio competes with them.

It will just go underground..

[denis-The-menace]

US NetCasters will either move to a country without those laws
OR
use an SSL tunnel to a server in a country without those laws.

I wonder what they do to Net radio stations with "ALL TALK" or ALL News" format?

Damned stupid over-bribed politicians.

Re:No taxation without representation.

[hkfczrqj]

You don't get a say until you start paying taxes.... So what can we do as non-immigrant, non-permanent, legal, F1 visa-holding, tax-paying residents of the US? That is, besides voting with my wallet (which is not useful in this case)?

Re:One day?

[Vancorps]

Except that this day of silence is to draw attention to the issue, much like the read people stop buying gas for a day. Has nothing or at least, very little to do with making them lower their prices. This will make a lot of people aware that the net radio stations are being extorted, a few of those people will be driven to do something about it that otherwise were unaware. If even a thousand people write to their congress critters about the issue, considering 72 million listeners that seems like a reasonable figure then there may be some legislative support stepping in to fight this obvious abuse of power.

If Pandora has to pay a minimum of $500 per channel and I have roughly 22 channels on my account alone right now then they are basically paying $11,000 just so I can listen to music. Could they pass that on to me? Sure but I would stop using the service and a truly great service dies. I keep Pandora even on my cell phone because I love it so much. The pricing is out of reach because it's modeled after traditional broadcasting services which realistically don't apply to net radio with it's unlimited personalization options.

In short, the pricing is absurd and most people don't even know what's happening.

Re:Here's the short, short version AFAICT

[CastrTroy]

Here's my question. If it's problematic for the radio station to work out deals with every owner of every song, then how does SoundExchange do it? Oh, wait, they don't. They have ties to all the RIAA music, but not all music, and yet they still insist that you pay the royalties, even if you don't play any music that's covered by their licensing fees. So if I set up a station and play classical music including Bach, Mozart, and a bunch of other guys who have been dead for a long time, the I still have to pay them. Sounds like extortion to me. Is there actually any way of getting out paying these fees if you don't actually play any music that they cover?

Re:News Coverage

[compro01]

Not true. A lot of terrestrial radio stations also broadcast a stream over the Internet

and, AFAICT, they are exempt from these new rules. they get to stay with the same rules as they currently have with terrestrial radio, so they get to have their current market and keep the new market all to themselves.

then again, i could be wrong, so someone please correct me if i am.