Interner radio set to die on July 15.

[bipolarbear]

They could still massively screw up somehow though. I'm not sayign the odds are realistic, but I'm not saying it's impossible for the situation to arise in which a third party could have a chance.

[Nostromo]

An article from the Washington post:

Day of Silence: Internet Radio Goes Dark

If you listen to music, news or other programming via the Internet, you're likely to find a soundstream of silence today. The Day of Silence is a one-day protest being staged by big corporate web radio outlets, innovative smaller companies that are trying to invent a new kind of showcase for recorded music, and individuals who've been flexing their creative muscles by starting up their own web radio stations.

The idea is to focus attention on a startlingly sharp increase--in many cases, more than double the current rates-- in the royalty payments that the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Royalty Board have decided web radio stations must pay to artists and record labels for the right to play their tunes.

Webcasters from big music providers such as Yahoo and Rhapsody.com to webradio pioneers Pandora.com and Live365 to local broadcast radio stations that have found new audiences on the web--eclectic kcrw.com from southern California, acoustic WXPN in Philadelphia, or bluegrass and alternative rock on Washington's WAMU.org are all rolling down the aural shutters for the day.

Why should you care? In many cases, the new royalty rates will exceed the total annual revenue of the web stations. That means, obviously, that those stations would cease to exist when the new rates kick in on July 15. And pandora.com, which creates a unique radio station for every one of its many thousands of visitors (the service uses a recommendation engine to select music based on your existing preferences), would face the prospect of having to pay separate royalties for each of its customers--an immediate death knell. All protest-related hype aside, thousands of web stations would vanish virtually overnight.

Why is the government doing this? Largely because the recording industry wants to stuff the genie back in the bottle and roll back the extraordinary blossoming of music programming available on the web. But the record industry isn't the only player here. The broadcast radio industry is clinging to its structural advantage over webradio: AM and FM radio stations must pay only one form of royalties--to composers of a given song--while webcasters must pay that royalty and an additional one to the performers of the tune.

Will a one-day protest have any real impact? Probably not, but the last time this happened, in 2002, when the government similarly sought to jack up web royalty rates, a Day of Silence led to national publicity that in turn played a role in a rate cut by the Librarian of Congress. Many of the college and solo operator web stations that went silent after the 2002 rate hike found ways to stay afloat, either by playing music in the public domain or by taking advantage of special rules that were written for small webcasters.

Will webradio really die, or suffer a serious setback? It seems hard to believe, given that the web is one of the few bright spots in a generally dismal season for the recording and music industries. There are two bills in Congress that would attempt to save web stations by restructuring the rates to give small and non-commercial outlets a hefty price break.

Is this all another Washington game of brinksmanship? Yes. Does that mean the new rates won't go into effect? No. What happens next? Silence, and then a lot more noise.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Left wing party you mean?

If I had meant left-wing, I'd written left-wing.

[Apocalypse]

Why does Pandora still work?

[SlowwHand]

RIAA cohorts in crime. Join the resistance!

[aneeshm]

I tried to go the Pandora site, and this is what I got.



I await the day when the cultural commons are free.

[LordShiva]

aneeshm sighting

[Wiglaf]

Er, pandora works fine in the US. Oerdin pwnt again.

[Adagio]

I believe I've read that the closing of internet radio stations was delayed

[Apocalypse]

I presumed, I was just was without a lot of news for a while and went here to catch up. Unfortunately there are no articles on what happened that are quoted here.