Internet radio is dying

[jetxl]

I listen to Soma-FM for half a year, but that may end with the new increasement of radio stations royalty fees. Broadcast stations as well as internet station need to pay a fee per song, but the new fees are not realistic compared to the income of a internet station. Senate bill S.1353 has been introduced to make the royalty fee fair for internet radio, but it still has to pass.

Read on here: http://somafm.com/crb/
And contact your representative.

[space boy]

I also listen to SomaFM. Discovered it just some weeks ago and it's an awesome station. Unfortunately I don't live in the US so there's nothing I can do. I encourage anyone who's from the US to contact their representative about this and support internet radio.

[LimpingFish]

This is an interesting article on the subject. It all sounds a bit shifty to me.

[BOYD1981]

i've been hearing about this on the various Digitally Imported stations i listen to (mostly Classical Electronica), but they also have the occassional advert.
it would be a shame to lose Soma, as i hear a lot of good stuff i can't find anywhere else on Groove Salad and i already lost the starstream channel to live135 or whatever it went to when it stopped being shoutcast.
it's really just another example of the rich wanting to get richer.

[Fee]

90% of Internet radio stations are playing the music ilegally. I understand totally why they want to impose fees for the songs that are played.

Its amazing how popular sites like you tube blatantly get away with breaching copyrights yet small time sites, stations and developers get shutdown or treated poorly 

[space boy]

It's not about imposing fees. It's about increasing them. SomaFM already pays fees so it's all legal, but if they get higher SomaFM, like many other legal internet radio stations, will have to be shut down. Also, can you link me to the source that says 90% of internet radio stations are illegal?

And about youtube. Youtube(the staff) itself is not breaching any copyrights. It's some users, and if youtube finds out they delete the copyrighted video or ban the offending user if he/she is a notorious copyright violator.

[Steel Drummer]

Pandora Internet Radio has actually been banned in numerous countries.
I don't see why people say that Internet Radio is illegal; it's the same as regular radio- you listen to randomly selected music and you don't get to keep any of it (it's not like you're downloading an album). 

[Mr Jake]

I don't see why people say that Internet Radio is illegal; it's the same as regular radio- you listen to randomly selected music and you don't get to keep any of it (it's not like you're downloading an album). 

Thats not where "Illegal" comes from, its to do with license. A regular radio station can't just play songs, they have to pay certain fees and licences etc etc (details of which I won't pretend to know). As do internet radio stations, those that don't are illegal.

My favourite internet radio station isn't affected by this, go them \o/

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Most players will let you save streaming data.  Granted, it will play back just like you heard it but you can still get it fairly easily.

[Nikolas]

Regarding copyright, etc...

It's not copyright the problem, but royalties. Airtime royalties.

Any composer/performer/producer/etc, should get paid everytime his/her song is on air, or on concert. This is what royalties means. If one of my pieces gets performer by an orchestra (for example), ideally I should recieve some money. Only I've not registered yet!

Now what is really interesting with this is that (I think) MTV is NOT paying any royalties to artists.

What is really further interesting is that youtube (the staff) are not really chasing after the 1000s uploading videos everyday. But if they get a message they run to delete the video. What is MOST interesting is that the artists themselves do not mind youtube at all! (For example, you can get all of the music and videos for Muse in their site. Same with Mika and his myspace page, etc. Times are changing). The people who are filling reports on youtube are the telly channels, like MTV, VH1, etc... That is because more than 90% of the videos are recorded from the tv... So it is illegal...

For me, it is kinda weird to be getting promotion from radio/tv and to ask them to pay you above all really... There should be some kind of deal (although in the long run I, as a composer, should benefit from all this )

As I see it, it's all an attempt to control the media, only it's rather difficult to do so... Internet is really huge and there is no way of stoping it. Even if pandora stops, there will be other coming in, day by day...

[Domino]

I use Napster to listen to pretty much all of the music i want. I became a Napster subscriber back in 2005 for 10 dollars a month. I get unlimited use of streaming music. There are tracks that cost 99 cents, and i will purchase them if i want the song bad enough. I have also bought whole albums from Napster and then burn them to a CD. It isn't the same Napster that was around 6 or 7 years ago, but there is so much music that i can listen too, and even create my own playlists. 10 dollars a month to access over 3 million songs is a good deal in my opinion. Not trying to sound like an advertisement, but i pretty much use it every day at work to listen to my favorite music. Most songs are available to stream and listen to without the worry of having to purchase them. Great service.

[space boy]

I never looked into it so I might be totally wrong but I always assumed that artists pay stations like MTV to get their videos played. The same way companies pay TV stations to get their advetisements broadcast. The artist gets publicity and the music station has an income. And the income for the artist comes from selling albums, concerts and broadcasting songs that are not meant for advertising purposes. That seems logical to me.

About the royalties thing. There are many internet radio stations around and they pay their royalties like a good little internet station should do. If these royalties increase only the commercially most succesful stations will stay. I havent  done the maths on this but this might actually backfire for the artists and they might get less royalties than they used to, because the royalties are higher but there are far less stations around to pay them. This might be the case if someone is not interested in increasing royalties for the artists but in removing competition.

ramble mode off....

ANYWAY! In poland we have a saying: "If you don't know what it's all about, it's about money".

[Steel Drummer]

Most players will let you save streaming data.  Granted, it will play back just like you heard it but you can still get it fairly easily.

There's an internet radio site called 'radio blog club' that lets you do that, but most other internet radio sites won't let you do that. I'm surprised they haven't cracked down on radio blog club.

[dasjoe]

Most players will let you save streaming data.  Granted, it will play back just like you heard it but you can still get it fairly easily.

ie you could use winamp and select diskwriter (comes with winamp) as its output plugin, it'll happily record everything onto your harddisk.
but there are better tools which automatically cut the stream into songs and name them correctly. this is even legal afaik

[jetxl]

Most hifi audio decks and portable radio's have tape decks so anyone can copy broadcast radio.
In the early days of the cassette tape the music industry tried to rally against it, claiming copying radio on cassette would destroy the music industry. They were wrong.
It seems that music is stronger that just upper class suits making less millions.

[Fee]

theres plenty of ways for saving streaming audio. For a start you can just open any old sound recorder and record that way, no different than someone using a tape recorder to record the radio.

Radiostations TV channles ect all pay exorbadent licencing fees to play what they do.
I dont know for sure that 90% of these internet radio stations are illegal, however the fact they play commercial music says it all. The fees are more than any kid running a radio station from his PC can possible afford and most internet radio is just that, a group of kiddies. Its starting to change, alot of commercial netowrks are picking up on internet radio these days and broadcasting their own stations, so id say its not as rife as it used to be.

As for you tube, you can blame the users all you want, but the point is that most of the Videos on there use somthign commercial, anything from the music to chopped up video clips dedicated to bands, actors, concert footage or even people playing covers of other peoples music. Its all illegal and should be removed. From what i can tell the only vids that get removed are the full TV show episodes.

Im not going to pretend i give a shit about people breaching copyrights or pirating music, software ect. (Infact i have recieved several Cease and Desist letters from iEntertainment in the past) But what i care about is how they crack down on poor minoritys who cant defend themselves and let the real "criminals" get away with it. If they were serious about enforcing this stuff, then they should take down the big guys as an example.

Then again, i dont think anyone wants to make the same mistake Metallica made taking on Napster. Yes they won, but it turned millions of people against them and just spawned many new file sharing networks thus increasing the problem. If they close down the small time guy, they piss off minimal people and aviod a mass of bad publicity.

[radiowaves]

The reason why videos stay in Youtube is that the owners get free advertising (Like some funny Budwiser commercial etc... a new way of advertising)

But heck, if I ever hear a commercial advert on a streamed ambient & chill radio, I would be devastated and all my chill experience would be ruined. Music should be free! In Estonia, there are some famous artists whose tracks are all free (a good excuse to continue stealig samples) and most of the tracks are used in commercial advertising, now thats pervertion. But at least the artists don't complain about it, they get fame.

I think that it is time for you americans to start boicotting and sabotaging something.

[space boy]

I think that it is time for you americans to start boicotting and sabotaging something.

Burning some embassies might be a good idea. I heard that's the civilized and intelligent solution to all problems.