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 ]

So I’m gonna write this as I go. I’m going to setup an Eggdrop bot on my server with most of my music that will take requests from an IRC channel and put them next in queue for the Sh17Radio. After I get that to work, I’ll have it check the shoutbox(or something) for requests directly from the website.

1. Install Eggdrop. My server has Gentoo on it, but you can download the source and compile it if you want to.
   emerge -avnu eggdropI lied. Follow this guide to download and install Eggdrop.
2. Download irssi or X-Chat and connect to irc.mygeekspace.com #thesh17
3. Install the http package for eggdrop in the scripts/ folder
4. …and this eggdrop shoutcast script
5. .rehash after you configure sc.cfg and add the two .tcl scripts to your eggdrop.conf
   Now you can type !sc:song or !sc:info, etc in the IRC channel.

– At this point, that’s all there is to do for a basic shoutcast bot. It even has a request system that notifies the DJ when there’s a new request. The only thing it doesn’t do that I want it to do is actually add the request to the playlist queue –

If you join the channel, you’ll see Sh17Radio announcing each new song, who’s listening and who’s broadcasting. I’ll post Part 2 when I figure it out.

So this is like the 3rd time I had to write this, because our host kept freaking out and nobody could access thesh17. But Anyway.

The Sh17radio is up now. You can see what’s currently playing on the sidebar to the right. Click the song name to listen or click here.

We’ll be broadcasting it 24/7, and I’ll setup some kind of automatic request system soon. Or at least a shoutbox or something.

Click here to listen to the sh17radio broadcast.

08/16/08 - Sh17Radio is sort of back up as an experiment.    More to come…  Stay tuned.