Darknet

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.

A 'chaos theory' for big media

Bob Garfield has an insightful new piece for NPR's On the Media on what he calls the chaos theory of big media. Jeff Jarvis (briefly), Om Malik (briefly) and yours truly (briefly) are among those interviewed.

See An Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.

I (and others) have been writing about this for some time -- the notion that we're in the midst of a major transformation in the mediasphere, away from traditional media pumped to us through one-way pipes and toward media that's much more under our control -- circular, responsive, malleable, multidirectional, personalized.

Simply put, people are looking to exert greater control over how they interact with media.

I just listened to it -- good piece, 12 minutes long, entertaining and dead on.

"The age of the mainstream media is passing. the new order is taking shape," Garfield intones. "Digits are the new widgets." He sees "an impending period of radical changes in the economy, the culture and society itself," and warns that "we are heading into a historically turbulent moment." Indeed, we've already entered this transformative period, which is ushering in "the democratization of media."

The result may be frightening to Madison Avenue, but it's empowering to the rest of us. "We cease to be demographics, we become individuals again," Garfield concludes.

"Mass media will be overthrown by micromedia," adds Drazen Pantic of Unmediated, perhaps a bit too melodramatically.

The show airs this weekend -- it aired Friday in LA, and it airs today in other cities.

NAB chairman blasts indecency crackdown

Billboard Radio:

Are federal policy makers “on the verge of killing free-over-the-air broadcasting with rules that stifle our ability to compete in today’s multi-channel universe?” That’s one of a series of hard-hitting questions posed by Phil Lombardo, joint board chairman of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, during a speech on broadcast indecency Thursday at The Media Institute in Washington, D.C.

In the lobbying group’s strongest statement yet on the issue, Lombardo called the government’s “crackdown on controversial and cutting edged programming” the biggest concern among broadcasters during the past 50 years. “Inconsistent” indecency enforcement has resulted in “tremendous uncertainty” and “unprecedented anxiety at every level of our business,” Lombardo said.

In a stinging indictment of the Federal Communications Commission, Lombardo accused the agency of propagating an indecency disconnect. “At the same time that indecency regulations are being ratcheted up against local broadcasters, cable giants like Comcast and Time Warner are raking in hundreds of millions a year from pay-per-view, hard core pornography.” ...

he Supreme Court’s landmark 1978 Pacifica indecency ruling was predicated on broadcasting’s “pervasive nature, Lombardo reminded. “Yet despite all evidence suggesting that broadcasters are less pervasive today – thereby warranting a need for less regulation of speech -- policymakers are even more strictly regulating free, over-the-air stations with more content regulation.”

Listeners and viewers suffer the most from that regulation, Lombardo argued, with the Veteran’s Day decision by ABC affiliates in 66 cities not to air Saving Private Ryan (out of fear of FCC reprisals) as one of the more glaring examples. ...

RIAA seeks radio broadcast flag

Glenn Fleishmann at DROXY: The Digital Radio Blog: RIAA Wants Digital Radio Broadcast Flag.

Pulling the plug on corporate radio

High school student Robby Valderrama in today's San Jose Merc: Pulling the plug on corporate radio.

... When flipping through your favorite radio stations, do you realize that 75 percent of the music you hear is owned by four corporations? According to a recent Yahoo.com report, ``Sony BMG, Vivendi's Universal Music, EMI Group and Warner Music account for about three out of every four records sold around the world.'' Artists ranging from Chingy to Eric Clapton all record for one of these four groups.

Then you add the ``corporatization'' of radio. Companies like Clear Channel -- which owns Bay Area stations KMEL (106.1), KYLD (94.9) and others -- have a network of stations across the United States and can control what goes on playlists.

For groups like MFS and their fans, this all translates to one thing: They're getting shoved out of radio play by acts that are backed by big corporations. ...

Many have turned to Internet radio, visiting Web sites like Launch.com and Purevolume.com.

``The only radio I listen to is Launchcast radio,'' said Rodolfo Sclafani, a freshman at the University of California-San Diego. ``It gives variety.''

TiVo for radio

Associated Press:

Call it TiVo for the radio.

A new $70 device called RadioShark lets you record your favorite AM and FM radio shows to your home computer and enjoy them later either from the desktop or a portable device. ...

Personalized audio on your media player

Rick Ellis at NBC13.com: 'Podcasting' Brings Personalized Audio Programs To Your Media Player. New Software Allows Users To Easily Subscribe To Audio Programs.

[A] new idea has sprung up in recent months that promises to change the way listeners view radio in much the same way that Napster changed the landscape of the music business and Tivo altered the viewing habits of millions of TV owners.

"Podcasting" is a term that is probably unfamiliar to most people, but it represents a real potential change in the radio landscape. A small group of enthusiasts has begun cobbling together a way to easily share homemade radio shows, eventually allowing people to reach large numbers of listeners by completely bypassing the current structure of radio.

Here is the non-technical explanation:

Podcasting allows you to subscribe to feeds, which include links to audio programs. Every time one of your subscriptions posted a new program, it would automatically download onto your computer. You could then transfer those shows to a portable music device, listen to it throughout your house via a wireless connection and take it with you wherever you go. Think of it as a personalized radio station that you program and change whenever you want.

DIY radio with Podcasting

At IT Garage, Doc Searls explains Do-It-Yourself Radio with Podcasting. Dan Gillmor says, "This is going to be a big deal, sooner than you think."

Doc writes:

Since the Net and the Web came along in the early and mid-90s, I've had a growing impatience with waiting around for stuff on the radio I might care about. Another way to look at it: All radio, commercial and noncommercial, including what we call the "content", was turning into the same kind of stuff-to-endure as the advertising and promotional announcements that paid for it.

But now most of my radio listening is to what Adam Curry and others are starting to call podcasts. That last link currently brings up 24 results on Google. A year from now, it will pull up hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions.

So this morning, here in my hotel room, I listened to the latest edition (September 27) of Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes about the open-sourcing of Frontier, and a conversation between Adam and Dave about all the above, iPodder, Trade Secrets Radio and much more.

What matters is that all the standards we're working with here are open. They're the new and growing infrastructure for a new class of 'casting. It won't replace old-fashioned broadcasting, just as FM didn't replace AM, and TV didn't replace radio. And it's not narrowcasting, which is conceived as broadcasting for fewer people. It's podcasting. I'll create an acronym for it: Personal Option Digital 'casting. ...

PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.

I hesitate to promote it, because, as Adam points out, the NAB — National Association of Broadcasters — is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations on Earth: far more influential, even, than the RIAA. (For more about that, and other alternatives to traditional radio, read Scott Woolley's Broadcast Bullies, at Forbes.) And the day will come, perhaps soon, when commercial broadcasters, and perhaps even NPR affiliates, will feel threatened by personal podcasting.

So what the hell. Let's bring it on.

The death of radio

Barron's (subscribers only): Losing the Signal. Radio may be in a long-term decline.

IT'S HARD TO SAY EXACTLY WHEN radio started to lose the love and the power and the magic celebrated in that 1975 rock anthem, but a good bet would be 1996. Landmark telecom legislation back then unleashed a powerful wave of consolidation that left the airwaves cluttered with commercials -- and investors set up for disappointment down the road.

Though many radio stocks soared seven- or eightfold during the merger frenzy, the excitement proved ephemeral. The stocks came back to earth with a thud, and the industry has since reverted to its former status as a generator of steady but unspectacular returns, with revenues growing little more than the economy as a whole. Worse, there's increasing concern that radio is entering a long-term decline, the result of new competition and technologies and changing consumer tastes.

Younger adults -- the key targets of radio advertising -- have clearly been losing their ardor for the medium. By one key measure, the number of listeners ages 18 to 34 has declined by about 8% in the past five years, as portable digital-music players, Internet radio programming and other innovations have started to take hold. And while the dollars spent on radio advertising have been essentially flat for the past few years, competing media like cable TV, the 'Net and outdoor advertising have been gaining steadily.

"It's over," Larry Haverty, a media specialist at State Street Research and Management in Boston, says of radio stocks' big run. "Something good happened in the 'Nineties; something less good has happened in the '00s. Every retailer is blowing its budget on advertising and radio is not getting any of it. If they don't get it now, they're not going to."

Clear Channel Communications, the big daddy of the industry, has seen its share price fall by nearly two-thirds since 2000 -- including 17% in just the past year. Citadel Broadcasting is off 33% this year and Cumulus Media is down 29%. But investors have by no means given up; the group is trading at multiples to cash flow that are higher than both their historic norms and the valuations of other media companies.

Investors, along with radio executives, may not be facing up to the full extent of the industry's challenges. While radio has always weathered past threats -- video did not kill radio's star, as a group called the Buggles prophesied in 1981 -- things could really be different this time.

Across the country, listeners are changing how they choose to receive music and news and talk radio. They are turning to portable music players like Apple Computer's iPod, streaming audio over the Internet and the emerging field of satellite radio to hear what they want, when they want to hear it.

Anne Kershaw, a 46-year-old lawyer who travels weekly between her home in Tarrytown, N.Y., and an office in Richmond, Va., bought an iPod in May, partly because "there is no decent radio station in Richmond. I was tired of being preached to." She still uses the radio -- but not in the old way. By attaching a transmitter to her iPod and setting it on a certain FM frequency, she can play the 983 tunes she has downloaded to the iPod through the radio, whether at home or in the car.

Music downloading is one of the "fastest-growing digital phenomena ever," says Forrester Research Group. It predicts download services will generate more than $200 million in revenue this year, $40 million higher than forecast and up from just $36 million in 2003. In all, some 35 million U.S. adults have downloaded music, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit initiative. ...