vsa said:
So tell me how you will be able to afford to pay the new rates?
Or are you even a legal operator?
The "Day of Silence" is designed to grab media attention. Non-participants such as you simply make the massage everyone else is trying to send less effective. Thanks.
And your station may gain a reputation as being out for itself only.
As someone that has been involved in the Internet Broadcasting Biz for about 8 years now I can tell you that internet radio listeners are almost as fickle as terrestrial radio listeners... the passionate ones (the P1's if you will) are excellent, but there are a large number that are very marginal. With that in mind, I fail to see how it is a good idea to turn your streams off and give an already fickle audience the opportunity to tune elsewhere or utilize other media.
If you play dead-air/carrier what good does that do? Suppose I'm a casual radio listener and attempt to listen to your station and I hear nothing or get an error because you've switched off the stream... I am going to go to another stream or ... shutter... turn on terrestrial radio, satellite radio or my own personal music library. I can predict your response to that... "but if everyone shuts their streams off..." Don't live in fantasy land, the rent is real steep there.
gunterm said:
It can't hurt to throw in SOME silence, but it's not a good idea for it to last a long time. I haven't exactly hammered out what I'll be doing. If the long form programming doesn't pan out it'll be a PSA loop with silence in between, possibly 5 minutes or so.
No. Silence of any kind equates to tune outs, period. I know that everyone wants to have this grandiose ideology that internet radio listeners are somehow more sophisticated than terrestrial radio listeners... and to some extent they may be, but your message is lost in cheap gimmicky parlor tricks such as these. If you wish to get the message out there, run PSAs, do your long-form programming, but actively giving people reasons to tune out without sending any message (aside from simply turning the streams off--or utilizing silence) is one that will be lost on the AVERAGE listener, and that's what this is about. After all, your savvy P1 listener already knows about the CRB, they are well aware of the issues facing the business, so your message needs to appeal to the broad base of average/casual listeners. Again, I fail to see how turning off a stream gets the message across to the casual listener.
As for the proposed royalty rates: Anyone that actually believes that the RIAA will adhere to those royalty rates is getting themselves worked up needlessly. A couple of reasons support my statement: 1) The company I work for has, in total, 40,000-50,000 concurrent listeners at peak hours, we would never be able to afford millions of dollars in royalties, therefore no one else likely would either. 2) If no one can pay, then the rates are unenforceable, because most stations are not paying royalties in the first place, so only a few companies (out of fear) would take their streams down, while a vast majority will remain on the air.
Sadly, most people in the internet radio business have the same or worse mindsets than those in terrestrial radio; they believe that gimmicks are the answer over substance... style is better than content is essentially what they're saying... bad idea.
