Radio KAOS

Well, this is depressing. From today's LA Times:

In a ruling made public Tuesday, the Copyright Royalty Board significantly increased the royalties paid to musicians and record labels for streaming digital songs online. The decision also ended a discounted fee for small Internet broadcasters.

Broadcast radio stations that also stream their programs online, such as KCRW in Santa Monica, said they might have to scale back on webcasting, and operators of Internet-only radio stations said the new fees would probably force them to go silent.

An estimated 72 million listeners each month tune in to Internet music programming from hobbyists, traditional radio broadcasters and Web companies such as Yahoo Inc., AccuRadio.com and Pandora.com, seeing them as an alternative to broadcast radio.

The board ruled that the current rate of 0.08 of a cent each time a song is played would more than double by 2010. For music sites run by tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, the board set a flat $500 annual fee per radio channel for a certain number of listening hours per month — which stations such as KCRW far exceed.

"Unless we can find an alternative to paying the published rates, there's no feasible way we can continue," said Bill Goldsmith, who operates an online rock-music station called Radio Paradise in Paradise, Calif. He estimated that he would owe $650,000 in royalties under the new fee structure in 2007 — 25% more than he expected to pull in this year from listener donations.

I often listen to Radio Paradise (as well a a few others, depending on my mood)--I have even sent them donations and bought T-shirts. They are a wonderfully eclectic radio station that has no real format, plays anything at any time, and is a great way to hear things I am not able to hear anywhere else, certainly not on terrestrial radio, which has become generally unlistenable in its blandness. There actually is good new music being made, but it takes some effort to find it. Oh, and this irks me:

All broadcasters have to pay royalties to composers and publishers, but traditional radio broadcasters — arguing that airtime is free promotion — have long been exempted from paying royalties to artists and record labels whose songs they play on the air. Laws passed in the 1990s governing digital recordings, however, required Internet and satellite radio operators to pay those so-called performance fees.

How is Internet airplay not free promotion in the same way? Do you know how many CDs I have bought as a result of what I heard on Internet radio in the three years that I have been listening to it? Well...let's just say that it's more than 50. A lot more. How many have I bought as a result of listening to terrestrial radio in the past 10 years? Zero.

I recently read an interesting history of modern radio called Something in the Air, and I am not alone in thinking that "traditional" radio has gone to the dogs. Sure, consultants and playlists and market research have made radio profitable, but for those of us (a minority, apparently) who really like hearing new and interesting music (not the same five songs repeated ad nauseam) and used to like listening to (more or less) freeform radio (although it was close to extinct by the time I started listening in), it has just become insufferably dull, like the modern shopping mall: an undifferentiated mass of uninteresting sameness. It figures--Internet radio has finally made radio exciting to listen to again and it's in jeopardy. Typical.