Day of Silence: Sort Of
By: Shelly Brisbin
Today, June 26 has been declared Tthe Day of Silence to protest increases in royalty rates that will affect Internet radio broadcasters, large and small, within the next three weeks, and likely drive many of the smaller ones out of business.
The unusual thing about his protest is that it brings together Internet broadcasters of all sizes; from Pandora to NPR, Live365 to Joe’s Internet Jazz Show (I made that last one up for dramatic effect, but you take my point, I hope.) At stake is the ability to deliver audio via the Net, not in MP3 or other formats that can be copied by nefarious music lovers, but simply streamed.
In our jaded, post-modern world, it’s fashionable to smirk at online “protests”. The standard line is that the protest does more to buck up the embattled forces of good than it does to cause the desired change to happen. I tend not to take that line in general, but in this particular case, it seems to me that a protest, or perhaps more accurately, a demonstration project, makes a lot of sense. For one thing, the Day of Silence itself is not designed to change the minds of the copyright board or lawmakers in Washington. Nor is it designed to move a commercial entity to change its ways. No, the Day of Silence is about showing people who consume and enjoy Internet radio what would be lost if royalty rates increased to the point that broadcasters decided to hang up their mics. Unfortunately, it’s not quite working out that way. NPR and many stations are still broadcasting today, as is AOL Radio.. Live365 and Pandora have gone silent. Perhaps today’s “protest” will go down as another futile attempt to move government toward a positive outcome: you can’t get people involved if they don’t perceive a threat to the status quo.
Despite the fact that it’s business as usual for NPR today, the network does offer resources for those who want to take action.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:21 am
I was surprised to see that homepages of radio podcasters were not plastered with a large “Day of Silence Banners” today. You would have thought NPR (who is supposedly trying to lead the fight) would have had a Day of Silence banner strung across its homepage as the headliner. Instead it’s a photo with the caption “Paying Nations Not to Burn”. Get real! Save that for tomorrow! The Day of Silence is TODAY!
I had to click and search numerous times before finally stumbling on the right information to contact senators in order to join in the fight. Later I discovered that clicking on the KCRW radio link, a window with the action information will pop up. If people are trying to hop on and click a link to offer support, that’s far too time consuming. Get it on the front page, NPR!
June 26th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Speaking for myself here, a decision to put an advocacy banner on the NPR homepage could be construed as breaking the law. Since NPR does receive some federal funds, it potentially means that we’d be barred from posting any kind of lobbying messaging on the homepage. Meanwhile, NPR news has to remain separate from what our government affairs office does, since intermingling news and advocacy might easily be construed as unethical journalism. The same situation would have applied to any other type of advocacy being done by our govt affairs office.
Meanwhile, Todd Mundt of Iowa Public Radio has a blog post about their decision not to participate, and why it wasn’t an easy decision to make.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
While I’m all for additional awareness about the upcoming royalty rate fiasco, I’m unsure if it is really raising much awareness. Personally, I’ve heard little outside of “yeah, we’re turning things off”… and I consider myself fairly plugged into things like this. If the silence is designed to bring listeners to action, I’m unsure if it will do that job. There is too much choice in new media for a large quantity of people to complain about missing their internet radio.
The real fun part will be when the copyright board uses the internet radio rate increase as a stepping stone for similar legislation for terrestrial radio.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
While this has no effect on podcasters, especially “podsafe” music podcasters, it still is a sad state of affairs.
I find it unfathomable that content owners want to make it more difficult for their stuff, especially back-catalog stuff that never gets airplay, to be heard. It’s to their benefit if I play a low quality mp3 of some song that inspires a listener to buy the track, or the album, either via iTunes or an actual physical CD. By continuing to cling to their antiquated business model, they alienate the consumer and their revenues will continue to decrease.
Terrestrial radio doesn’t care, their pockets are deep, they still make tons of money, and the demise of internet radio only helps Clear Channel and XM/Sirius. The “little guy” takes it on the chin, again, and the rich…get richer.