We originally started the station for independent music and unsigned artists, but there wasn't enough of an audience for this, not to mention the difficulty in getting permission for each and every artist that we played for awhile it was fine, but eventually it was entirely too much labor. Thus, we went the fully licensed route, trying to compy with these misguided regulations.
We have looked into creative commons licensing, which is a great idea - but not widely accepted enough. If you look in detail, each commons license can be slightly different, and again, it takes a lot of work to find appropriately licensed, high quality, creative commons licensed work. This would require some full time staffed positions and we are not in a position to do that being an indie web radio station. There really isn't an effective interface between the artist and the content user. Building upon what mp3.com had started, Soundclick is a start.
I run an internet radio station that is being affected by this legal fiasco going on. We do our best to deter stream rippers with cross fades and station ID's and for the most part it is successful. We broadcast our main channels at 128 kbps to compete against DI.fm that offers 128kbps for subscribed listeners. We also accomodate lower bandwidth with lower quality streams.
It does take a lot of work and investment to keep the playlists fresh and the content interesting, and because we are playing cutting edge music, we like to keep the audio at as high a quality as possible. Most of the music we play is from Europe anyways so it frustrates me that we have this US jurisdiction for European (mostly) music that we play.
This entire situation points to an outdated business model for soundexchange to enforce in a digital environment. If so many exceptions have to be made for a law to work - it is time to re-think the law.
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We originally started the station for independent music and unsigned artists, but there wasn't enough of an audience for this, not to mention the difficulty in getting permission for each and every artist that we played for awhile it was fine, but eventually it was entirely too much labor. Thus, we went the fully licensed route, trying to compy with these misguided regulations.
We have looked into creative commons licensing, which is a great idea - but not widely accepted enough. If you look in detail, each commons license can be slightly different, and again, it takes a lot of work to find appropriately licensed, high quality, creative commons licensed work. This would require some full time staffed positions and we are not in a position to do that being an indie web radio station. There really isn't an effective interface between the artist and the content user. Building upon what mp3.com had started, Soundclick is a start.
I run an internet radio station that is being affected by this legal fiasco going on. We do our best to deter stream rippers with cross fades and station ID's and for the most part it is successful. We broadcast our main channels at 128 kbps to compete against DI.fm that offers 128kbps for subscribed listeners. We also accomodate lower bandwidth with lower quality streams. It does take a lot of work and investment to keep the playlists fresh and the content interesting, and because we are playing cutting edge music, we like to keep the audio at as high a quality as possible. Most of the music we play is from Europe anyways so it frustrates me that we have this US jurisdiction for European (mostly) music that we play. This entire situation points to an outdated business model for soundexchange to enforce in a digital environment. If so many exceptions have to be made for a law to work - it is time to re-think the law.