I am a heavy user of net radio. As such, I’m a bit impacted by today’s “day of silence”. However, I fully support the efforts that our net radio friends are working on to save this medium. The way things are right now, net radio stations are looking at a 300% royalty increase that will be effective on July 15th. And that increase will be retroactive to January. The net effect (please forgive the pun) will be many of these stations imploding. I am in full support of artists being compensated for their work. However, this will remove a revenue stream as well eliminating a channel to expand their fan base. There are two big losers with this system: artists and listeners.
I urge you to head over to savenetradio.org to learn more about the issue. From there, you also will be shown how to contact your representatives in Congress, where there is legislation underway to reverse this. With all of our efforts, we can bring about a more sensible solution to ensure that artists are fairly paid and internet radio is able to stay on the “air”.
