From the front page of [url=http://www.somafm.com/]soma.fm, formerly the hippest Internet streaming radio station:

“The final decision on webcasting rates have been published on the Library of Congress’s site. To say the results are disappointing is an understatement. While the rates were effectively cut in half, that still means that to stay on the air, SomaFM will have to pay about $500 a day in fees to the RIAA. Just to expose you to new music that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. Just to help you buy more records. Do they just not get it, or is the RIAA just greedy?”

SomaFM was awesome — they played a wide variety of eclectic stuff, largely ambient techno, trance, jungle, drum n’ bass, and other kinds of nifty electronic music thoroughly ignored by mainstream broadcast radio. My personal favorite was their Secret Agent channel, which played, well, you know, secret agent music — 60’s era mood and lounge pieces, mixed with retro-tinged electronica, and interspersed, of course, with sound bites from James Bond films. Rob Flickenger enjoyed the channel so much that he even sent them a decent chunk of money.

The very worst of it is that I am now that proud owner of a Groove Armada CD that I’d never have purchased if not for having first heard them on soma.fm. How do you like them apples, Ms. Rosen?

So what does this imply for the future of Internet streaming radio? Are we going to be reduced to having Sony and Disney and AOL Time Warner et al. as the only providers of interesting content on the Internet *as well as* in broadcast TV, cable, radio, and most movie theaters? Here in Sebastopol, we’ve been contemplating hosting a streaming radio station on our community wireless network — does the RIAA expect to be able to police that as well?

It’s the RIAA, not SomaFM, that should be put down. It’s clear their sole motivation is thinly disguised greed made increasingly frantic in the face of technology that has already made them obsolete. What a godawful dark day for the Internet.

Is this the end of indie streaming radio on the ‘Net?

*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do ***
*** New! Discuss Posts - http://e-democracy.org/do/discuss.html ***

Take a look at http://www.saveinternetradio.org and follow
http://doc.weblogs.com and other web loggers on the subject of CARP
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/carp/webcasting_rates.html
or the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel. More from the recording
industry http://www.riaa.org/Licensing-Licen-3a.cfm.
A text clip below makes it clear that most Internet radio stations, even
online versions of traditional broadcasters with music, in the U.S. will
close because of costs.

Here is where the issue of fees for streaming songs came from
<http://news.com.com/2100-1023-217284.html?tag=bplst>. And news and
activism from today http://www.kurthanson.com/ and from Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/2...51222&mode=flat.

You can observe webcasters in their natural online environment here
http://www.broadcast.net/pipermail/webcasting/ and
http://community.streamingmedia.com/cgi-bi...l?visit=thelist.

>From an online activism stand point the Saveinternetradio site and sites
like http://www.digitalconsumer.org need to ratchet up their e-mail
activist alert efforts and begin identifying supporters by geography
(congressional district) in order to have any real political impact. The
Net may be global but politics starts local.

My questions - how does this impact streaming in/from other countries?
Will this lead to a major split in the kinds of music streamed on the
Internet where royalty-free music dominates hobbyist streams and the
vast catalogs of past recordings owned by record companies will only find
a place on traditional broadcast radio? Will the unintended consequence
of this lead to a new paradigm where a minor league of music essentially
gives stuff away and only the best (I imagine some sort of Internet music
chart) get grabbed up by the recording industry? Or will this change the
economics so dramatically such that new bands with talent find a way to
survive and make money without a major recording contract? No clue. I am
an e-democracy guy.

Steven Clift
Democracies Online
Listening to Jazz with Winamp http://www.winamp.com via Shoutcast
http://www.shoutcast.com/waradio.phtml perhaps for the last time?!


Here is a bit from the home page of Saveinternetradio:

The CARP decision:

Most Webcasters had hoped that the CARP's recommended royalty rate would
be based on a percentage of revenues somewhere between the 15% of
revenues that the RIAA had been asking of Webcasters and the 3% that
Webcasters had proposed (which would be more in line with their ASCAP,
BMI, and SESAC royalties to composers).

On February 20, 2002, however, the CARP arbitrators issued their
recommendation .14 per song per listener for Internet-only webcasters,
.07 per song per listener for broadcast radio simulcasts, and .02 per song
per listener for non-commercial radio simulcasts.


CARP rate implications:

While CARP's proposed royalty rate might be manageable for Internet radio
properties owned by multi-billion-dollar corporations like AOL, Yahoo!,
and Microsoft, it seems as if it will effectively bankrupt the vast
majority of Webcasters.

For example, for a mid-sized independent webcaster (e.g., two or three
people working out of a home office or dorm room) that has had, say, an
average audience of 1,000 listeners for the past three years, the bill for
retroactive royalties -- which will come due sometime early this summer if
the CARP rate recommendation is approved -- would be $525,600!