Attention US Readers! I don’t do a lot of activism here (aside from complaining about things) but this matters to you. Today your favorite internet radio stations are participating in a “day of silence” to call attention to a new copyright law going into effect on July 15th. It will raise royalty payments that internet broadcasters must make tenfold. Since there is almost no money in internet broadcasting, this would effectively eliminate it.

This would be bad for listeners because typically the internet plays stuff you don’t hear on the radio; it would be bad for radio because they would lose a source of cheap market research and it would be bad for the music industry because they can’t break new artists nowadays. Most likely people will just lose interest in commercial music. It’s as if the AM radio cartel had found a way to squash FM in the late ’60s.

Look, I have my own music podcast and I want to keep doing it.

Congressmen have about 18 days to vote the thing down, and they’ll do it if they think they’d lose votes if they don’t. Tell ‘em. Check out SaveTheRadio.net for helpful congress-harassing tips. Kurt Hanson has some good information about this stuff too. Remember, if it wasn’t for internet music we might not have Lily Allen or AFI now. Do it for them. No, do it for me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 1:47 am and is filed under DRM, General, Internet, Podcasting, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.