As we all know, the royalty fees for Internet radio are due to spike. So i did a wii bit of looking around to see what we could do about it. And i found this

http://www.capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/callalert/index.tt?alertid=9731806&action=printversion&print=1&zip=67124

Its a list of all of our representatives phone numbers, and how to talk to them about keeping our net radio free! So call them up and persuade them to keep it free! F the RIAA!

Gerg Jew

I’m probably a little bit late in writing this, but today a lot of internet radio stations shut down for the day to bring awareness to the new rates the RIAA are trying to force on them.

So today is a day of silence for 100s of thousands of internet radio stations including Live365, Pandora, AOL, and Yahoo Launchcast.  Some stations are airing conferences and debates about these issues instead of going completely silent.

I don’t remember the exact numbers, but basically the RIAA want internet radio stations to pay royalties per track played per person.  So if there’s 100 people listening for an hour to about a total of 20 songs; that counts as 2000 songs the RIAA thinks we owe them.

Satellite and normal radio stations don’t have to pay fees like this.   At least not this extreme.  Some big execs are just afraid of the internet.  They think people will/are recording internet radio streams and saving them to their harddrive.   I’m sure there are a lot of people who do this; most don’t.   What’s going to happen is that more and more people start illegally downloading music because they can’t listen to it free through their favorite internet radio station anymore.

Most small [and law abiding] internet radio stations will simply shut completely down when this comes to pass. There’s no way they’ll make enough revenue to cover the new royalty rates.  It’s estimated that royalty fees eat up about 26% of the income of major internet radio stations like yahoo and aol while with the new rates that will jump up to at least 52%.

Free internet radio stations have no chance of surviving unless they implement a lot more advertising or switch to a paysite altogether.

The sh17radio’s been down for a while anyway, but hopefully I’ll find a server somewhere out of the country that can broadcast it without breaking laws.

If you want to help out [which you do.  or else you're a dirty bastard] head over to the Save Net Radio Coalition and get the number for your local representatives and “persuade” them to adopt the Internet Radio Equality Act bill.

And check out the myths and facts page to clear some other things up.

[ picture from here ]