Where’d the music go???
Posted: June 26th, 2007 | Author: vinnie | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Hear that? It’s internet radio silence. Congress has recently added a bill forcing internet radio stations to pay more the double what they were previously paying to grandpa RIAA. What, internet radio stations had to pay RIAA? Yes, and now a ‘law’ that requires stations to pay $0.0008 retroactivly since the start of 2006, increasing to $0.0019 by 2010. Not a lot you may say, but that’s per person, per song. It adds up very quickly.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_radio#2007_Copyright_Royalty_Changes
Why does this suck? Because normal radio (aka crappy, repetitive music, that the RIAA/clearchannel control) doesn’t pay this fee, and satellite radio has a much lower fee slapped to them.)
I don’t mind paying cold hard cash for my music, in fact, I do that each month to Yahoo Music (formally Launchcast). I just don’t like the RIAA extracting more money out of the distributions channels the can’t control – and by perverting the law to force enormous copyright fees, just delays the whole free market thing from toppling the RIAA (and uber wealthly popstar artist.)
So what can you do? At this point, not too much, though there is a campaign, called savenetradio.org, it’ll give you your reps phone numbers so you can harass them to pass a new ‘internet equality act.’ Makeing the call would be great, I’m just trying to spread awareness.
See what some sites have to say (pandora.com), but don’t listen to last.fm, they just were purchased by CBS and now sing a different tune. (CBS being one of the largest terrestrial radio networks in the U.S.)
p.s. photo stolen from kuhner04.
Now is the time to get fit!