If you’re like many EW staffers here in bad-reception New York City, you spend many of your work days (Don’t worry boss, we’re still hustling!) and leisure hours at your computer, listening to Internet streaming music rather than traditional radio. Tomorrow, though, you’ll be tuning in to the sound of silence. And we don’t mean the old Simon and Garfunkel chestnut.
Popular webstream stations like AccuRadio, L.A.’s KCRW, Pandora, Live365, Yahoo, SomaFM, Bagel Radio and Washington D.C.’s WAMU are joining together June 26 for a Day of Silence to protest the new high music royalties for Internet radio that were laid down in March by the Copyright Royalty Board. Effective July 15, the CRB is asking stations to pay some 30 percent more for song use to record companies, applied retroactively to 2006 and in each of the next three years through 2009. Activists argue that this kind of imposition will not only widen the gap between the Davids (small independent stations) and the Goliaths (XM, Sirius), it could make operation unaffordable for most ‘Net radio outlets, ringing the death knell of some of the most original, unique programming out there. The new fees are advocated by the recording industry and digital rights clearinghouse SoundExchange, groups that argue that the protests are a smokescreen to hide the dominance of Internet radio by a few media giants who could well afford to pay artists the higher royalties.
What do EW.com readers think? Do the small stations doth protest too much? Should artists get the same amount of money for their songs, no matter who’s playing them, and to how many listeners? Or is the CRB a big, bad wolf that deserves a poop sandwich for taking the hard line?
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The digital stations absolutely have the right to protest!
Almost a hundred comments about what’s ‘hot’ this summer, and one (wait, two?) comments on the death of independent radio.
Good luck world!
You don’t know what you got til it’s gone. I encourage everyone who has ever listened to an internet radio stream and liked what was being played to sign the petition (most likely linked at any of the station websites above) and make your opinion known.
One link is here:
http://www.xpn.org/petition/
Yeah, but EW doesn’t really cater to the indie crowd. Haven’t you noticed that when an article’s about music, they’re most likely referring to Madonna, Mariah or American Idol.
The news is terrible, I found a lot of bands (Spoon, Wolf Parade, My Morning Jacket) through web radio that would never get played on terrestrial radio in my area.
fuury, your post just reminded me that I haven’t seen a Listen to This (was that what it was called?) insert in my EW in ages. That was a good source for reviews and notices on more obscure music.
If it wasn’t for EW reviews I would not have found out about bands like Calexico, Guillemots, Tindersticks and Grandaddy to name a few.
They have every right to protest this. It’s ridiculous! These companies aren’t happy unless they make a dime every single time their song is played. Next it will by pay-radio where you have to insert a quarter to listen to any music! IMO, Pandora is one of the best things to happen to the internet. It saved me so much from boredom at work before I got an iPod. It would be a very sad day if the independent stations were to die.
Yeah, it was Listen 2 This. I liked those, but then they started not being exclusively about music, (they started to include video games & comic books too, I think), and then it disappeared completely. A shame.
I am getting sick and tired of the recording industry ruining all the ways I get my music! I get that they’re loosing money since no one is buying CDs anymore, but had they not made them so expensive in the first place, none of this would have happened. They shut down Napster and now they’re going after internet radio?? What next? What am I going to listen to now while I’m at work???
Also, I think it stopped being about indie music too. If I remember correctly, one of the last cover articles was about Def Leppard’s covers album.
Thanks for posting about this. The idea that Internet radio is dominated “by a few media giants who could well afford to pay artists the higher royalties” is absurd. I work for WXPN, and for our station (a public radio station that came into existence in 1945 as an AM band), these royalty hikes could cost us more than $100,000 annually. That’s several times the annual funds raised by business support on the Internet streams. Please help support Internet radio — and Net Neutrality — by signing the petition at: http://xpn.org/petition/
funny that both digital and terrestrial radio stations are run the same format that everyone enjoys and now the RIAA & CRB want to end this practice of no pay for play cause by default it free publicity
This has not been a good decade for the perception of radio
It is all about the money. Everyone do yourself a favor and rent the classic film FM. FM is about a station manager refusing to give air time to the Army. The manager gets fired, thus sparking a protest by his employees. The manager and the employees eventually want no commericals and more music played.
It is not about the music it’s about the dollar. Napster was originally pirating music but it gave people a chance to listen to indie music. Originally, the only way to listen to unknown bands was to tune to the left of the dial where college radio stations were. The web is the new “left”. I recently turned on a web channel that played classic synth and new wave but most of the bands were classic indie synth. It was brilliant! Sign the petition and d-mn the man!
poop sandwich!!!
The music industry really works hard to shoot itself in the foot. I am against illegal downloading and I believe that people should be paid but when you let the greed take over it doesn’t help your case. Paying for the number of listeners? Are you kidding me?
Definitely a poop sandwich.
So the only way to keep the music industry afloat is to alienate even more fans?
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