I am directing you to this reposting (I know. Right?) by Lorra R to all my groups because I feel that it covers a very important topic that effects us all, but before going there please read and consider:
This is a very crucial time for protecting media freedoms and one very important topic has to do with Internet Radio. It seems that it is threatened by unconventional royalty fees designed to assassinate. These fees have been upheld and the cost of them exceed the revenue by a factor of 5 without having a provison for percentage.
Internet Radio cannot exist because of this ruling. It will signoff on July 15th if nothing happens.
I do not know about you, but I'm tired of the cookie-cutter programming we get from established conventional commercial radio. If you are not, that's great for you, you have got plenty to listen to and enjoy, while getting the same old kind of programming that might try to make you want go to war with someone one of these days should the drumbeat call again.
Internet Radio has the capability to reach a global listenership. Through it we can prove to the world that we, despite how we may be portrayed, are a decent people without foreign media filtering it. Luckily for us English is the most widely spoken language in the world.
Los Angeles has a lot of radio stations, but the only conventional radio I listen to anymore is NPR Member Station KCRW 89.9FM and Pacifica Station KPFK Free Speech Radio 90.7FM, because the programming is far richer than you can get from any of the commercial joints because there is a deeper purpose. The polices of corporate radio have become soulless which is great if you are a shareholder holding executives to the grindstone to increase ad revenues, which there is nothing wrong with. Make your precious ad revenue, but I admire things like originality which sprouts best under a different format.
Once something original hits a large enough demographic or becomes cool, the profit-minded bosses put their focus group analysts in high gear to find reasons behind the coolness developing their own theory as to why something becomes cool. From there they develop a programming strategy to net the largest number of listeners which is hunky and dorry. I am not saying that there's anything wrong with that, but just like jazz according to Louis Armstrong, if you have to ask you will never know. Something tells me that they will never know.
Internet Radio is an important voice. It would be a pity to lose it because monetary and special interests assassinated it. It would take its place next to the electric car in the potter's field for great ideas killed by money-interests.
The article I am linking to will tell you how you can take action. This is still a democracy after all.
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Comments: 8
Music? Everybody else has to pay composers and recording artists royalties, why shouldn't Internet radio? It is the way composers and lyricists earn their money.
The same would go for reading of poetry or dramatic works. The material is protected by copyright, and may not be used without the permission of its creator.
If the royalties are paid to the recording artists and record companies it is not only their way of earning a living, part of the money they earn from royalties is us to pay the royalties they must pay for the right to perform the work.
To repeat using copyrighted material without the paying the royalties the holder of that copyright may charge for permission to use it is a form of theft and this being a democracy has nothing to do with it.
Because conventional radio stations don't have to pay royalties. They are the marketing machine. Could you imagine what it would be like if conventional radio stations were charged per song, per listener? How many songs get played in a day? How many people does that reach? It's ridiculous. That's not free enterprise. That's despotic enterprise.
http://www.savenetradio.org/