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The Day the Music Died
By Nicole Chardenet, Bristol
There are ten years in a decade, and hundreds, if not thousands of rock songs released every year. You'd think with those kinds of numbers that there'd be an almost endless supply of diverse, interesting music on the radio. But you could never tell from Connecticut FM radio, in which the stations across the dial appear to be running the same format, with the same small pool of songs played endlessly day after day.
Consolidation of radio station ownership, largely aided by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, has enabled large conglomerates to take over greater numbers of radio stations. They cut budgets and operate as cheaply as possible. They slash the formats, replace live disk jockeys with canned electronic jocks and replay the same endless retinue of tunes over and over again until you think you're going to rip your own ears off if you have to hear "Jack & Diane" or "Born in the USA" ever again.
What's a music lover to do, when she can't take another round of "Sweet Home Alabama" or "Beast of Burden"? Hey, is that "Burnin' For You?" That's the fifth time this week, and it's only Tuesday! "Piano Man" again? Are you guys aware that Billy Joel was not a one-hit wonder?
Walk into any electronics store, and their solution is satellite radio. By all accounts, satellite radio gives excellent reception, including under bridges, underpasses, tunnels and on mountain roads. Not to mention the wide variety of radio stations to choose from, coming from all over the world—Hey! I haven't heard that song in years! Why can't they play that on Connecticut FM?
The problem with satellite radio is it's expensive to install, and there's a monthly subscription cost—although the good news is it's cheap, from about $10-$13 a month. Very likely worth it if you spend a lot of time in the car. On the other hand, the satellite companies are already in trouble financially, and no one knows where they'll be in a year or two—which is what prevented me from seriously considering it when I decided two weeks ago that I must find an alternative to FM radio before I started running over pedestrians with road rage. Or maybe radio rage.
So I solved my problem by buying a Sony Walkman that plays both regular music CDs and MP3s (digitized music) that have been burned to a CD-R or CD-RW, with a cassette plug-in for my car radio. I then spent several nights ripping my prodigious collection of '80s New Wave music (it would scare even Duran Duran), my almost complete Pat Benatar collection and my fully complete obscure English Goth band collection.
This worked nicely, except I didn't want to listen to MP3s in the car and at work as well, as I would quickly get sick of them, too. So I discovered the joys of radio webcasting—radio stations around the world, of a wide and extensive variety of formats, which I could listen to through streaming audio over the Internet (this works better for people with high-speed access like DSL or cable modem). I found two Irish radio stations I liked, a Goth station out of England, the BBC, even a British Columbian station called—I kid you not—Radio Satan 666. (But, er, that wasn't my cuppa.)
Finally! I had purged my life of boring FM radio! The only problem is, if the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has its way, we'll all be railroaded back into their cookie-cutter spoon-fed dreck in no time.
For starters, there's the draconian DRM (digital rights management) technology they are pressuring hardware manufacturers to build into their computer components to prevent the piracy of intellectual property like software, movies and music. Nothing wrong with that, except that it infringes on the customer's right to make copies of legally purchased material, a right that has been in place since the early 1980s in response to the music industry's claim back then that people did not have the right to videotape TV shows or make tapes of record albums for the car. The RIAA today argues that that does not apply to the new digital world. I disagree, but that's for the courts to decide.
The RIAA is also going after the webcasters. They argue that they ought to be compensated for the use of their music—which is true, and most radio stations, which are already operating as traditional radio stations, pay regular royalties to the recording industry. The Net-only guys don't, and I think they ought to pay at least a little something, rather than get it for free.
But the RIAA isn't interested in fair compensation. What it wants to do is drive the competition out of business so we'll be forced to go back to their auditory pablum. So it's pushing a royalty payment plan that, if passed by Congress, would not only require webcasters to pay for what they broadcast on the Net, it would require them to pay retroactively for what they've broadcast already. Not only will this be double-billing the traditional stations, but it will drive the little guys out of business. Why? Because the RIAA wants seven cents a song, per listener.
No one can afford that, not even the more established radio stations. The little guys will be forced out of business, and even into debt. It's going to stifle the innovation in radio which is sorely lacking on the traditional dial. It's unfair to the companies that already pay royalties, and unfair to the ones who can't afford a fee that high. Note, I'm not arguing the little guys shouldn't pay anything—but seven cents a song is a bit high, accumulated, and per listener is nothing short of outrageous. Since they're operating on a shoestring, maybe charge them a low set fee—like a penny per song broadcast, period. Let them know it's for a limited time only, and at some point in the future they should expect to pay a bit more.
Stodgy executives in suits are killing FM radio, but they haven't figured that out yet. They are actively working to eliminate anything that will compete with their low-cost mind-numbing radio formats. The music's not dead yet, but it may be in a few more weeks—the royalty payment plan is set to start this month unless a new agreement can be hammered out (and there are last-minute machinations going on as I write this). Stay tuned, kids … and if you hear "The Wall" for the eighteen billionth time, you’ll know who won.
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