Darknet

Internet radio booming but threatened

San Jose Mercury News: Internet radio booming but threatened. Excerpt:

With a growing audience of up to 54 million monthly listeners, Internet radio is one of the biggest trends in digital music. But if you believe the industry's leaders, it's threatened with extinction.

They say the rates they have to pay the recording industry are bankrupting them. They're appealing the government-set rates, pressing Congress to change the rate structure and pursuing negotiations with the industry.

Now a congressman has stepped in to oversee the negotiations and Webcasters are ramping up the rhetoric.

"We're very supportive of paying royalties, but this structure is wrong, unfair and unaffordable," Tim Westergren, founder of Oakland-based Pandora, said in an e-mail to the Mercury News. ...

Small, independent AccuRadio owes about $67,000 a month in royalty fees this year, though its monthly revenue is only $40,000 to $50,000, said CEO Kurt Hanson.

The current fee structure is a disgrace and amounts to legal extortion imposed by the federal government on behalf of record companies.

Save Internet radio

Save Internet radio -- take action now. Unless there's a public outcry, things look bleak for this new largely grassroots medium.

The last days of Internet radio?

BusinessWeek Online: The Last Days of Internet Radio?

A decision by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board to hike royalty fees could put some small online radio stations out of business. Under a new rule, online radio outfits will begin paying on a per-song, per-listener basis, which could raise royalty fees more than tenfold.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Radio rebel refuses to back down

Brad Kava in the San Jose Mercury News: Radio rebel refuses to back down

Shooting down satellite radio?

BusinessWeek Online: Shooting Down Satellite Radio? Terrestrial broadcasters are going for an FCC-aided kill in their long-raging fight with XM and Sirius.

Don't touch that dial, RIAA!

A new bulletin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation today:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has seen the future of radio. And it would prefer to live in the past.

Digital broadcast radio is a standard for transmitting digital stations on existing analog radio bands. Known somewhat misleadingly as "HD radio" (the audio quality is about the same as analog FM), its adoption is giving tech companies a chance to experiment and innovate in the world of consumer radio.

TiVo-like functionality could be built into your digital receiver, letting you automatically build playlists and skip across channels based on your personal tastes. Computer-operated radio cards could be enhanced with new features using the standard's metadata. Tomorrow's tinkerers could give us new ways to enjoy radio, just as the engineers who brought us VCRs helped transform the way we watch TV.

As Mitch Bainwol, chairman of RIAA says, radio has a chance to become active, not passive, entertainment.

But when he and the RIAA say that, they don't say it like it's a good thing.

Last week, with a coalition of copyright holders, the RIAA sent messages to members of Congress requesting that the FCC be given new powers to hobble digital radios so they perform worse than the analog radios of yesteryear.

According to the RIAA, you should be able to record off the radio, but only subject to their "usage rules":

* recordings must be for no less than 30 minutes;

* recordings cannot be divided into individual songs, nor will you be allowed to jump between songs;

* recordings must be encrypted and locked to the individual recording device (no transfers to your iPod!);

* recordings can only be triggered by a human pressing a "record" button or by pre-programmed date-and-time (like your old VCR!), which means no smart metadata driven features like TiVo's "Wishlist."

In other words, the RIAA wants to micromanage how you record off the radio!

The most amazing thing about this? There is nothing illegal about recording from digital radio. Congress specifically gave radio fans the right to record off the radio (including digital radio) in the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA).

That law also gave innovators the right to build digital radio recorders (including smart digital radio recorders) without fear of copyright liability. There is nothing in that law that says the recorders have to be made artificially stupid by FCC regulation.

Don't let Congress turn back the dial on digital radio. Write now, and let your representative know that the RIAA is out of line.

Take action, and write to your representative

More info on the latest RIAA lobbying in Congress.

EFF's comments (PDF) to the FCC on the RIAA proposals.

Here's some additional background, a story I wrote last year titled A lockbox for digital radio.

How to record Internet radio

From Jim Coates, tech columnist at the Chicago Tribune:

Q. I would like to catch a one-hour radio program in my computer or on a CD for later listening. It's a station out of California (I'm in Wilmette) that I can only pick up via my computer. But it's broadcast when I am in the car picking up kids and groceries. Is there a way I can tune in on the computer and set it to save the program for me? I have Windows XP and a CD-RW drive.

A. There are many software products that cover this growing demand as Internet radio takes hold. Folks realize that a computer can do a better job recording--not to mention saving tape storage space and ending the hassle of fast-forwarding and rewinding cassettes.

The best-known software for recording Internet-based radio broadcasts is Replay Radio, a $30 program that currently offers TiVo-type radio recording of nearly 1,000 specific shows and around 1,300 Web accessible radio stations. I'm betting your favorite show is among them, P.A. To find out, you can download a free limited demo at www.replay-radio.com.

This works great if you're only interested in hearing a show, as opposed to turning streaming music into MP3 file collections for use on mobile digital players. A large and growing number of commercially peddled programs handle that MP3-from-streaming audio but most of them are a bit weak on the scheduling aspect.

Applian Technologies Inc., maker of the Replay Radio program, also offers a more expensive ($50) program that can create MP3 files of streaming music cuts and usually tag each with song name, artist, etc., just as Napster and iTunes do.

Audio MP3 Recorder ($15), a much less expensive program that I use, lets the user click an icon and turn streaming audio into MP3 files on the fly. It's at www.mp3-recorder.biz.

On NPR today: 'On the Media'

I just came home from lunch in San Francisco when my 6-year-old ran up to me and said, "Dad, you were on the radio!" Ah, the lure and power of big media. Will it still hold true when Bobby is my age? I'm not so sure.

I did a quick interview at KQED's studios on Wednesday with Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media about "Darknet," and it just aired. (The fact that I've been on the show a couple of times aside, I think it consistently ranks as one of the best-done programs on the creative destruction happening in the media world today.)

Here's the streaming mp3 of the program (I think you need Real to hear it), and a description of the segment from their website:

For every move that media industries have taken to protect their copyrights, there has been an equal and opposite countermove by consumers. In Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, J.D. Lasica explores the realm in which so-called pirates operate - slicing, dicing, and sharing media to their hearts' content. Lasica talks to Bob about how Hollywood is driving consumers further into the shadows and under the radar.

I was glad to see that they used a mash-up that I'd sent them of rx's My Name Is Rx, a remix of George W. Bush's speeches and presidental debate verbiage set to the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. (Download it here.)

By coincidence, I was just coming back from lunch with ... Bob Garfield, who's in town to give the keynote at a marketing conference Monday, and Brendan Greeley, who's working with Christopher Lydon on open-source radio (and is in Berkeley this weekend to see his girlfriend). We wound up having brunch at Santorini, a new Greek restaurant near Union Square.

By further coincidence, Brendan was also on On the Media today (though he was interviewed by someone else). So natch, we chatted about blogging, podcasting, the future of media, advertising models, the remix revolution, why people go to blogging conferences, Jeff Jarvis's new job, and lots more, between gyros and moussaka and lots of caffeine.

Great to finally meet Bob G. (pictured above) in person (had I known Google Images would be so barren of photos, I would have brought my camera). And I'll be working with Brendan in the coming months to create a resource on Ourmedia for podcasters to learn about what they can and can't do under the law.

Creeping corporate weaseldom

NY Times:

Any company that tries to pull a fast one on an increasingly media-savvy populace should first consider the power of blogs.

Clear Channel, thought by its critics to be the best representative of the creeping corporate weaseldom that has brought on the ruination of commercial radio, tried to dupe radio listeners in Akron, Ohio, by posing as an anticorporate pirate radio station.

Via some audio trickery, Clear Channel made it sound as though pirate signals from "Radio Free Ohio" were bleeding into several of the other stations it owns. The "pirate" signals, and a Web site set up to promote the new station, lashed out at corporate radio.

Suspicious, someone using the handle "Turbo Ninja" looked up the Web site registration for radiofreeohio.org, discovered it was owned by Clear Channel, and posted the findings to the message boards on the Web site of the independent station WOXY.

"They're ripping corporate radio as a means of encouraging people to listen to a slightly different kind of corporate radio," Turbo Ninja wrote.

Podcasting and the future of radio

This morning I got up early and, before the coffee kicked in, participated by phone as a guest on the Diane Rehm Show, where we discussed the future of radio.

I lobbed a couple of grenades, such as suggesting that commercial radio is dead, and that podcasting - personalized, portable, on-demand Internet audio - is the wave of the future.

Diane Rehm wasn't in today, but Steve Roberts - erstwhile Washington journalist and hubbie of Cokie Roberts - served as a knowledgeable host. Also joining the roundtable were

The show's producers agreed to let us post the broadcast on Ourmedia, so now I've got to figure out how to grab the stream and convert it to MP3.

The Diane Rehm Show comes out of American University and is syndicated nationally on NPR. That makes my third NPR guest spot since last summer. Now, we just need to get some discussion of the personal media revolution on Fresh Air.

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.