Gathering Places
Gathering Places
STAR-BULLETIN / 2002
Webcaster Robert "Rabbett" Abbett's Internet Radio Hawaii at www.irh.com is threatened by new rules on royalty payments that many say are excessive.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. >> It's been ages since I listened to commercial radio. The quiet death of Internet radio
Surprises have been banned from radio. Most radio stations repeat the same songs from a playlist you could write on the back of your hand. Some have self-consciously outrageous announcers with a speaking style stolen from guys in fairground dunk-the-clown booths. I was chased away years ago.
This saddens me. I grew up holding a transistor radio to one ear. In elementary school, it brought me the glories of Motown, the Stones, the Beatles; it was a tinny conduit to something distant and exciting. And I remained a radio freak when I was college, listening to FM stations with mellow-throated announcers who felt a missionary-like need to impart the lore and theology of the music late into the night.
All that was long ago. But just lately, I have started listening again. Not to real radio -- now called "terrestrial radio" -- but to Web-based radio. I have become a "streamie."
Web "stations" broadcast over the Internet to your computer using streaming audio files. (That's why those who listen are called streamies.) Unlike music-file sharing, it's legal, aboveboard and helps sell CDs.
Somewhere on the Internet is a station that plays to any taste. With rudimentary software, any enthusiast can throw together a station. Arbitron estimates that close to 80 million people have rediscovered radio this way.
These range from stations that are not unlike an old-fashioned '70s-style progressive radio station -- Jimmy Buffett's Radio Margaritaville, the alt-rock Radio Paradise, Jacksonville-based Radioio -- to stations too obscure to even make it on campus.
How obscure? I often listen to a Webcast that plays 78 rpm and wax-cylinder recordings of folks like Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke.
Because the airwaves are 100 percent jazz-free where I live, the Web is my only source of jazz radio. I usually listen to a station from Berlin with a DJ who speaks in sultry, Euro-accented English and another, maintained by a med school student at the University of Kansas, that tends toward late '50s hard bop and cool jazz.
(From Hawaii, listeners can enjoy the music of paradise on Robert "Rabbett" Abbett's Kailua-based Internet Radio Hawaii at www.irh.com.)
I've found all-lute, all-the-time stations. All Baroque. All techno/industrial hard-trance rock. All bluegrass. All pre-'60s Broadway. All streaming as you read this.
Sadly, the streamie radio renaissance is too good to last.
I expect most of them will shut down by next year. Then, Web radio, like FM radio, will be the dominion of Big Music.
It doesn't have to be like that, but the usual forces of short-sighted greed, musical monoculture and power lobbying in Washington are combining to shut down Web radio.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, Web stations can play music but must pay royalties. The amount was to be figured out later. Well, the rates have been decreed and they're steep. They will silence most small operators.
You'd think a fee system similar to regular radio would be worked out, but no.
Radio stations pay royalties only to composers on the theory that each song is a commercial for a performer. Radio stations also pay fees as percentage of their income. Web radio, however, must pay per-song, per-listener fees. They must pay both composers and performers. It's a big difference.
Since it created the problem, Congress should step in and step in fast -- before it recesses. But ensuring that Boccherini, Beiderbecke and bluegrass stay on the air is not a big political priority.
So, I'm listening very appreciatively now. It may be a long time before I hear Dave Brubeck coming through a speaker unexpectedly.
Rock Incorporated soon will do to Web radio what it's done to FM radio. It's sad to see that happen all over again.
Mark Lane writes for The Daytona Beach News-Journal.
