Slashdot Mirror
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.
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. :(
Can all fish swim?
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.