Tomorrow (26 Jun) is the Internet Radio Day of Silence. Many major webcasters like Yahoo! Launch, Rhapsody, and Pandora are taking part, along with a large (and growing) list of smaller stations.

The Day of Silence is in response to huge royalty rate increases that are likely to force many webcasters off the air. Smaller, ‘long tail’ stations – those playing the sort of music we care about – are likely to be the hardest hit, along with those offering innovative, potentially disruptive services such as Pandora and Live365, leaving only a few monoliths to play out the same Top 40 playlist-driven pop that is failing (in the US at least) to capture interest, enthusiasm, or audiences.

Some comment

A couple of interesting snippets from the SaveNetRadio blog.

OutboundMusic

It’s not really about proper and fair royalties. It’s about the major labels deciding who gets airplay on the Internet through the use of unreasonably high statutory royalties to force competition out of the market-many Internet Radio stations working with the majors will have sweetheart deals which reduce their commitment or exempt them completely from paying the fees. Sound familiar?

There is nothing illegal in what the majors are doing. […] It is a business strategy most MBAs would embrace for companies producing widgets. But it’s not good for the music industry. It’s bad for the fans, bad for the artists and bad for music diversity.

Ian Rogers from Yahoo! Music:

Compare the implications of this decision to terrestrial radio which pays NOTHING to SoundExchange, or even satellite radio which pays only 3-7% of their revenue to SoundExchange, and it’s hard not to be left scratching your head. The irony of all this, of course, is that this ruling will keep LAUNCHcast, Pandora, and the like out of your living room and push you toward FM, where the labels are paid zero. This decision cuts off a genuine future revenue stream before it has had a chance to grow.

It’s not just the Webcasters that will suffer. Higher costs, fewer Internet broadcasters and stations means less diversity overall, and less opportunity for the unlimited spectrum of Internet radio to become a discovery tool for curious listeners and a launching platform for smaller artists. Internet radio features thousands of channels in the narrowest of genres as well as personalized services (LAUNCHcast) and recommendation systems (Pandora), while FM radio (where it still plays music) plays the same songs over and over and the total number of satellite channels is less than five hundred. I am a satellite radio subscriber and can honestly say it doesn’t even come close to representing the diversity I get from my personal LAUNCHcast station. Listeners and artists ultimately lose if this infinite spectrum of music choice evaporates or even shrinks to just a few players. The implications for innovation in the space are catastrophic.

More info

• RAIN announcement
• More from RAIN and station list
• Pressrelease from SaveNetRadio (pdf)
• DI post