Save net radio...

Tomorrow, thousands of webcasters will be turning off their streams in protest of a huge rate hike for music streamed over the internet. A bill signed back in March is changing the way that royalties will be paid. The old method was per song, but now royalties will be charged per listener. So for each listener that hears a song, a royalty needs to be paid. If a station plays a song to 500 listeners, then they need to pay royalties 500 times for that single song. On top of that, royalties will have to be payed retroactively. This is enough to shut down many small stations' streams and for an internet only station, that effectively leaves them out of business.

If this does bill does not get changed, we can all expect many of our favorite internet radio stations to shut down completely. That would suck...a lot.

It's funny how the record companies want to make more money yet think that the best way to do that is to keep people from actually hearing the music they want them to buy. I do a show at a local college radio station that centers around new music and just getting it out there and heard. Because we are a small station without a lot of money and are located in NJ which has a very full FM band, much of our listenership comes from the internet. Our signal is not very strong and even when we move to our new tower site this fall we still won't be broadcasting terribly far so the internet will continue to be important to us. Our licensing fees are paid for by a blanket agreement that Rutgers University has with the major licensing companies so we will be largely unaffected, but there are many for-profit stations out there that are similar to us and rely on internet listeners.

You can get involved and help by going to www.savenetradio.org.