Random Thoughts
- Things for iPhone and iPod Touch
  Jul 21, 2008
  To help you get organized.
- The Art of the Title Sequence
  Jul 11, 2008
  A blog and gallery of titles sequences...
- 70 Amazing...
  Jul 01, 2008
  business cards. Look!
- Cool Typography!
  Jun 24, 2008
  Typographic posters and Photoshop effects.
- Web Color Visualizer
  Jun 17, 2008
  From IDEO

Day of Silence to Save Internet Radio!

Posted on June 21, 2007 by C Johnson
Culture, Industry

About two months ago, we ran a post here on our blog about the future of Internet radio. Situation is now critical, and webcasters around the country have banded together for a national Day of Silence this Tuesday, June 26th, in protest of the impending royalty rate increase that is scheduled to go into effect on July 15.

Internet Radio sites will either be completely shutting off access to their streams, or simply replacing music with long periods of silence maybe with a public service announcement or two. The massively popular KCRW plans to air a special one hour program on the royalty issue entitled “D Day for Webcasters.”

A similar protest was staged five years ago after a royalty rate ruling from the CARP. The shut down drew a tremendous amount of publicity and led to a rate cut—which is of course the goal this time around.

In case you don’t know what’s going on, the long and short of it is that the government is essentially trying to strong-arm independent internet radio out of business. Royalty rates normally run about 4 to 5 percent for mainstream mediums like satellite radio. But the rates set by the CRB judges come out to about 50% of revenues for big wig webcasters like Yahoo’s LAUNCH and 150 to 300% for smaller webcasters like AccuRadio and (my favorite) BagelRadio. The more channels the worse it gets, which means that it could cost huge internet favourites like Pandora, which features hundreds of channels, well more than 1,000% of revenues. Oh and did I mention that the ruling would be RETROACTIVE from January 2006?

Bankruptcy would be an inevitability for scores of webcasters.

But hope is not lost. The Internet Radio Equality Act (H.R. 2060) has a growing number of supporters in the House of Representatives (118 at last count) and yes, you can write your congressman about it. Pandora, Yahoo and a slew of other webcasters have already done just that! Or you can join the crusade to keep Internet radio alive at Savenetradio.org.