Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Music industry to webcasters: Pay up! By Janelle Brown Will the new copyright law's rules help Web radio flourish -- or smother the infant medium?
Nov 9, 1998 | You may never hear a good techno set on a radio station on your FM dial -- there's just not a mainstream market for such esoteric music. But every month, more than 90,000 jungle, house and techno fans flock to the Betalounge Web site to tune in to live DJ sets by some of the world's most renowned turntable experts. The year-old startup is run by a handful of young musicians, and as co-founder Brian Benitez explains, "We're trying to provide an outlet for the kind of music you don't hear in traditional media -- we want to help be a promotional outlet for smaller record labels."
But thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, legislation that was signed into effect by President Clinton last week, the Betalounge founders are worried about staying in business. Provisions of the Act that restrict what webcasters can do were championed by the Recording Industry Association of America as a way to regulate the distribution of music online; these new rules may strangle the infant Net radio and webcasting companies before they have a chance to explore what their new medium can do.
"It could be prohibitive. If this is implemented in a stringent way, we won't be able to do what we're doing right now, and it wouldn't be as much fun," Benitez worries. "It's a freakout on the part of [the RIAA] -- they don't really understand digital music so they're going for all kinds of special protection that goes against precedent." Traditionally, broadcast radio stations have never paid recording companies for the right to play music -- but now the industry is trying to rewrite the rules.
The Betalounge isn't alone in its concern about the new bill. More and more people are surfing to a soundtrack: More than 1,700 radio stations currently broadcast online, according to Broadcast.com -- from terrestrial radio stations being redistributed via the Web, to small eclectic online-only stations like GoGaGa, to personalized radio services like Imagine Radio that serve up countless channels of niche music. Rolling Stone launched Rolling Stone Radio last week, and SonicNet released its own service, FlashRadio, earlier this month. There are even more webcasters that, like the Betalounge, broadcast weekly shows and concerts.
Net music is a nascent industry that just happens to be facing off against an extremely powerful trade association -- the RIAA, which represents the legal and financial concerns of the $12.5 billion recording industry. The record labels are worried about protecting their music and their profits; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act promises to do both. But digital media companies are starting to fight back by organizing their own lobby. And as legislation creeps into the online world, there's promise of a long battle between record companies and the technology companies that want to change the way we consume music.
Get Salon in your mailbox!