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 ]

Another one from south park. Stan’s dad makes a common mistake

 If you’ve ever been this drunk, you’ve been drinking way too long.

Remember Nick Frost?   One of the guys from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.   This is him.

• I checked Google’s Webmaster Tools and saw a lot of 404 errors dealing with */Unknown
  • I don’t know what’s going on or why Google wants to add /Unknown to every link it finds. So I’m going to leave it alone for now.
• I have my 404 error page set up to email me whenever it gets hit and there’s always tons of favicon.ico errors so I finally figured out the solution.
  • In my headers.php file I changed
    <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” >
    to
    <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.thesh17.com/favicon.ico” >
  • Pretty easy fix. I was almost tempted to create a .htaccess rule to redirect all favicon.ico requests to that file until I realized it was my fault for not using an absolute path.
• There’s a lot of 404 errors that look like this : “http://www.thesh17.com/wp/2007/04/17/hot-fuzz-from-the-people-who-made-shaun-of-the-dead/feed:http://www.thesh17.com/comments/feed/“
  • I don’t know how to fix this really. It only showed up recently so I’m hoping it’s just someone’s broken browser. As far As I can tell all links to comment feeds are correct and working.
• The following pages were reported as not being reachable but work fine now.
  • http://www.thesh17.com/tag/DND/
  • http://www.thesh17.com/tag/Dumb_bitches
  • http://www.thesh17.com/tag/automatic_updates/
  • http://www.thesh17.com/tag/music_video/
  • http://www.thesh17.com/wp/2007/05/21/v…for-the-weekend-weirdass-road-accident/
• There’s 272 urls being restricted by the robots.txt file and it cut my supplementary indexed pages down a lot. There’s 283 pages indexed by Google now.
• Disabled the Shoutbox on the sidebar.
• Removed the tag and category pages from the sitemap.xml file since they were being blocked by robots.txt anyway.
• Disabled the Text Link Ads plugin.
• Removed the Vizu Poll in the sidebar.

There’s some other things I did too, but I was bored and felt like listing these.

[tags]sh17,maintenance,thesh17,wordpress,the sh17,website,plugins,dreamhost,favicon,404,error,google,sitemaps,text link ads,vizu,polls[/tags]

This set the world record for largest and most costly mouse plague ever.  It’s crazy.

Southpark teaches you things too.

I’d hate to play this version.   Whoever made it is a sick bastard.