[VAXman(Admin)]

Originally Posted by Rick and Roll

Help me out here.......

"I just want to get back to helping webcasters get business and figuring out how get more ad revenue," said Johnie Floater, general manager of media at Live365. "We've been spending all of our time playing lawyers and lobbyists."

I read this quote and it sounds to me that Live365 is fighting to use music for free to enable internet radio to make profits.

You see the inconsistency? This is not the same fight we have. Not only are we non-profit (which doesn't mean non-exempt from this) but we do this for no reason but to have fun. We do not sell ad space! We play music.

I'm not going to read into what their statement meant. I will say though that this whole internet radio thing is new and many have yet to figure out how to make money from it. Do you remember the .BOMB era of the late '90s. Sights were running in the red but stocks for them soaring. This was all on a lot of speculative gambles that the web would win them fortunes -- it did not. There are sites from that era that did survive and make it, but there are many more that failed. Unless you are actually "selling" something, making money on the internet is dicey at best. Many of the sites we all visit are littered with ads sold to pay for the space. For example, my favorite, mywaste.com People go there and setup pages for free. GREAT, I suppose, and companies pay for ad space to make this possible. However, is there really any gain from these ads? In many cases, it's difficult to prove.

The RIAA and SoundExchange have been buffaloing the public that streaming radio is making big money. I don't believe it and even if it did, why should streaming radio pay humongous amounts to do what the traditional air-waves broadcasters do for free?

Originally Posted by Rick and Roll

While I think that Sound Exchange is reprehensible in their tactics, they do have a valid point. And in the end, I cannot see how Live 365 can say this and expect not to get whacked.

So by association, we will eventually be swept into whatever happens with the "big boys". And that's a shame - we're HELPING artists and that's it!

WHich is why the artists are following the links on sites like savenetradio.org to voice their opinions. The non-big-label artists will never see a single iota of the money SE collects. For that matter, I wonder how much money the big-label artists will see.

Originally Posted by Rick and Roll

So watch a good thing be forever dissolved, while your kids steal music and hurt artists.

I do not think it is right to download music unless it is explicitly sanctioned by the artist(s) as a free download. I personally enjoy the tangible media.

While most of what is downloaded I could care less about, I do have to look at it as if it is music and artists that I do. Unless the music creation model changes, free music is not free. Steve Hogarth has spoken at length about his/Marillion's ideas for changing the model when they did their album pre-orders. It sounded like a really great idea but I doubt it could ever truly work.

I still think that the "traditional" model of exposing a listener to the music and then, if they like what they hear, they purchase is a model that will be with us for a long time. If the RIAA/SE/LoC CRB have their way, this model will be corrupted. Strange is that this is how they've been making money for as long as music radio has been popular... at least the past 50 years... maybe more.