Illegal Downloading & the Death of Internet Radio

Since the 1990's and the first sign of peer to peer software, most notable Napster, where online users could upload and swap music freely, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the major record labels have claimed massive losses due to illegal downloading of music. While there is no denying that piracy has had an impact on the music industry but you have to question how much of that has been brought on by the labels themselves.
They have always been historically slow in adopting new technologies and moving forward with the times. When Napster, Kazaa, and the other file sharing sites first hit big, the record labels spent all their time and resources trying to shut them down rather than moving ahead and trying to find a way to compete. During this timeframe, for every site they shut down, 2 similar style websites popped up creating a futile chase that they could never hope to win.

What's lost in all this is that piracy has always been around. Us old fogies can remember borrowing a friends LP and taping it. The argument is that the quality is way better now but back then LP and cassette were the best quality around and the effect was exactly the same. I think the major record labels have to look in the mirror and own up to the fact that since the dawning of the music video they have been releasing sub-par music based solely on the fact that they can make a mint off of some little hottie that can barely sing but will parade around half-naked in a video and sell 5 millions albums based solely on that. These "artists" are so desperate for a recording contract that they sell their souls to the major labels who in turn rake in all the money that is inevitably made on the backs of these poor schleps.

In light of all this the real musicians are forced to compromise their integrity or their look and sound simply because their label doesn't think they look quite right or don't sound enough like the latest, greatest band who just sold 10 million albums until what we end up with is a generic Top 40 broken down into different genres like rap, hip-hop, pop, and rock with each artist in those genres becoming increasingly indiscernible from the next. This is all fine and well for fans of that type of music but what about people like myself who would rather jam red hot skewers into their ears than listen to the tripe that is played on terrestrial and satellite radio (to a lesser extent)?

The last bastion of sanity for the alternative or eclectic audiophile is internet radio. There are literally tens of thousands of these stations that stream music fit for every taste 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, but they are now under attack and there is a very real possibility that they could all vanish in the next year or so thanks to a royalty rate increase that will financially cripple all but a select few. Here is how it all breaks down: since 1998 the online station have been paying a royalty rate of $0.000768 per song but thanks to a raise in royalties et forward by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) those rates would increase to $0.0019 by 2010 not to mention the fact that the stations would also have to pay a minimum $500 annual fee to the CRB. Most, if not all of these stations rely on donations from their loyal listeners and run a very tight budget which will be blown out of the water by this increase. It will not affect terrestrial radio that is protected from this increase thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which was introduced back in 1998.

There is a bill going through the US House Of Representatives called the Internet Radio Equality Act which is looking to reverse this decision and it has the backing of a number of Senators as well as a large group of musicians who rely on internet radio to receive any kind of airplay at all. At the end of the day it's the average listener/consumer who is going to pay the biggest price for this as we are left with nothing but mediocre, re-hashed, unimaginative music piped through our radio airwaves as our computers remain silent where once there was music by artists who care nothing about the bottom line but instead have a passion for their craft that is unmatched by anything the major labels could ever hope to churn out. If this does happen it will be my own personal "American Pie" as it will mark "the day the music died".