Get this. Say you’re a musician, and you record your own music and post it on the web to download. No problem. But should you decide to stream it, you’ll have to pay royalties. Even if you release it for free use. Now say you’re a college radio station or some other independent outfit, and you stream your music over the internet - soon you may have to pay huge royalty fees thanks to the RIAA, retroactive back to 1998. This could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars for some stations. So in protest, internet radio stations are planning a Day of Silence tomorrow the 26th of June.
Many internet radio broadcasters are shutting down their broadcast or instead broadcasting static to show exactly what this will do for media democracy. Podcasts, of course, will still be available, because they’re not live, but recorded. And as a matter of fact, if you’ve been a listener of my show and you can’t listen to internet radio tomorrow, I’ll have something ready tonight for folks to download. Oh yes!
For more information, see the Radio And Internet Newsletter.
