Save internet radio!

Today i discovered an independent online radio station which has owners that see radio as an art form and not a platform to turn out a endless stream of advertisement and mediocre music.

At the moment they pay around 10-12% of their income in royalties for the music they play, which seems very reasonable to me. But the "US Copyright Board" has made a decision about online radio which will mean the end of Radio Paradise and many other online radio stations.

This new regulation means the stations have to pay not 10-12% but as much as 125% of their income in royalties.

So if they don't have some huge advertisers behind them (which will lead to a music station with a lot of advertisement, thus leading to the opposite what they want their station to be) they will not be able to continue their work and passion.

Tip: Check out these useful Internet Radio articles here on Ghacks:

• Screamer Radio 1.0 Internet Radio player
• The best free Internet Radio Recorders
• Find Internet Radio stations by name, song or artists

If you want to read more about this issue visit Save our internet radio which is made by the owners of Radio Paradise and is a good source for more information.

Update: The Save our Internet radio website is no longer available. You will find a couple of petitions on the Internet if you search for Internet radio, but the majority of those date back a couple of years and are of no use today anymore.

A bill was introduced in September 2012 that aims to lower the fees paid by Internet Radio stations and Pandora Media, the company behind the popular Pandora music service. What Pandora tries to achieve is to establish a level playing field between Internet and terrestrial Radio stations.

Royalty rates for different formats of digital radio are astonishingly unequal. Currently, internet radio shoulders the largest royalty burden, far higher than any other form of radio. Last year, Pandora paid roughly 50 percent of its total revenue in royalties, more than six times the percentage paid by SiriusXM. The Internet Radio Fairness Act of 2012 addresses this discriminatory practice of favoring one form of digital radio over another by extending the common standard to include internet radio.

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