If you listen to music, news or other programming via the Internet, you're likely to find a soundstream of silence today. The Day of Silence is a one-day protest being staged by big corporate web radio outlets, innovative smaller companies that are trying to invent a new kind of showcase for recorded music, and individuals who've been flexing their creative muscles by starting up their own web radio stations.The idea is to focus attention on a startlingly sharp increase--in many cases, more than double the current rates-- in the royalty payments that the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Royalty Board have decided web radio stations must pay to artists and record labels for the right to play their tunes.
Webcasters from big music providers such as Yahoo and Rhapsody.com to webradio pioneers Pandora.com and Live365 to local broadcast radio stations that have found new audiences on the web--eclectic kcrw.com from southern California, acoustic WXPN in Philadelphia, or bluegrass and alternative rock on Washington's WAMU.org are all rolling down the aural shutters for the day.
Why should you care? In many cases, the new royalty rates will exceed the total annual revenue of the web stations. That means, obviously, that those stations would cease to exist when the new rates kick in on July 15. And pandora.com, which creates a unique radio station for every one of its many thousands of visitors (the service uses a recommendation engine to select music based on your existing preferences), would face the prospect of having to pay separate royalties for each of its customers--an immediate death knell. All protest-related hype aside, thousands of web stations would vanish virtually overnight.
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