If you care at all about music, about art, about having a touch of color in your lives, about having a piece of your life that exists outside of the corporate Borg, you need to read this diary and recommend it.
Money is not involved. Your precious time, however, is really needed. It is one minute before midnight.
And by the way, hello. This is my first post here. I hope I can provoke some thought and some action.
While we are trying to save our country, we also have another thing to worry about - something our Democratic representatives played a major role in creating.
The music is about to die. The coup de grace is about to be administered by the U.S. Copyright Office.
I am a virtually constant listener to Radio Paradise, which is a Web Radio station that generally commands about 10,000 listeners at any given time during the day. I will proceed to establish my thesis through a quote from Bill's recent blog post on the topic of Web Radio royalties, which threaten to destroy his business:
I'm Bill Goldsmith, and my wife Rebecca and I have spent the last seven years of our lives pouring our hearts, minds, and financial resources into Radio Paradise. We are now faced with the very real possibility that all of our efforts will have been in vain, and that the thousands of people who are devoted listeners to our station will have it snatched out of their lives.
I have been in love with radio all of my life, and spent 30-odd years dealing with the conflict between my vision of radio as an art form and my FM-station employers' vision of radio as a conduit for advertising. I have watched the medium that I love turn from an essential part of the process of connecting those who love making music with those whose lives are touched by it into a mindless background hum of advertising and disposable musical sludge.
With the advent of the Internet, we were finally able to bring to life the radio station I had always wanted to work for (and listen to): commercial-free, passionate, and embracing a wide universe of musical treasures, from the classic rock artists I grew up with to the latest indie discoveries, with a liberal sprinkling of world music, electronica, jazz, even classical. We have slowly built up a loyal audience and have been able to support ourselves while living our dream.
An Exciting - But Fragile - New Era for Radio
The Internet has changed radio in a profound way. Instead of a business that required investments so huge (millions of dollars for even a small-market FM station) that a programming focus on the lowest common denominator and an extreme aversion to risk or experimentation was an unavoidable consequence, a radio station with a global reach was now within the grasp of anyone with the talent and determination to make it happen.
Every day we hear from listeners who are profoundly touched by our efforts - by the music we play, by the way we assemble the songs into meaningful sequences that are more than the sum of their parts, by our passion for what we are doing, and our commitment to never contaminating the music with advertising. And our station is but one of many who have attracted that kind of passionate following, and provided that kind of outlet for radio artists like myself.
The Internet's paradigm-shifting gift to radio programmers and music lovers - at least those in the US - is now in danger of being taken away by the misguided actions of the US Copyright Board. The performance royalty rates released by the Copyright Board on March 1, 2007 are not just extreme, not just burdensome. They are a death sentence for all US-based independent webcasters like Radio Paradise, SOMA-FM, Digitally Imported, and many others.
One of Bill Clinton's most misguided acts as President was to sign the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, that horrible omnibus of soulcrushing corporate regulation.
It turns out that the U.S. Copyright Board has unilaterally issued a new set of royalty guidelines that must be exclusively adhered to by every Internet webcaster in the US. Authorized, apparently, by the DMCA, passed by a Republican Congress (with the active connivance of many Democrats) and signed into law by Bill Clinton.
All this while the oligopolistic Clear Channel Corporation, and every other horrid vanilla wasteland FM and AM radio conglomerate, pay virtually no royalties at all by comparison (h/t to Kestrel9000 for the correction).
That's right, folks - the biggest media companies pay no artist royalties. The only people who get payments of any kind from Big Media are the copyright holders, which are invariably the record companies.
Instead, Web radio is being forced to pay royalties in a fashion that would instantly bankrupt them, under terms that the big corporate radio companies don't even have to consider, using nonsensical technical distinctions drawn within the DMCA language between analog wavelength signals and digital broadcasting through multicast protocols. The conclusions within this legislation favor two ologopolies - the big radio companies such as Clear Channel, and the big record companies including Warner Music and Sony. All is this deliberate and very much intended to shut down new and emerging markets and to defend the incumbent ologopolies from the consequences of free competition.
The links below give more details.
For more specific information of the DMCA, and its baleful effects on the tiny musical outlets we still retain in this country, please go to the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN).
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) talks a lot about how they're trying to protect artists, but the facts of the DMCA (and the record industry) give this the lie.
I explain further below why this is such a terrible event. It has ripple effects throughout our lives. While only a small minority of us listen to web music radio, we all have opinions and likes and dislikes about music. Many of us are quite passionate about aspects of music.
If Web radio goes away, I submit that indie musicians will never gain the audiences they need; that people of talent will starve in this country even more than they already do; and that the pop-culture industry will have extinguished the last flickering flame of art and rebellion in our culture. Deliberately, and with malice aforethought. With politicians of both parties acting as servile handmaidens.
My letter to Congress (Please copy and send to others)
This is the note I sent to Lynn Woolsey, my representative (I will be doing many more over the next few days):
As your constituent and a more or less constant listener and financial contributor to Internet radio, I was alarmed to learn that music royalty rates were recently determined by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) which, if enacted, would certainly silence all of my favorite online listening services. For most webcasters, this royalty rate represents more than 100% of their total revenues!
The shuttering of the webcasting industry would be a loss for not only independent business owners, but also for musical artists, for copyright owners, and for listeners like me who enjoy the wide variety of choices available via Internet radio.
As a personal note, and as a musician myself, I think the music industry already does a fabulous job exploiting artists and crushing creativity. AM and FM radios are a wasteland. The quality of recorded music in the mass market is in the toilet. The only hope for people like me to hear valid art is through Web radio. I have purchased over 100 CDs over the last five years solely through my exposure to Web radio. Why should our government, and an unaccountable group of bureaucrats, be allowed to make all of our lives that much more grim and colorless?
I respectfully request that your office look into this matter and initiate action to prevent it. As the CRB rate decision is retroactive to January 1, 2006, please understand that time is of the essence -- as the immediate impact of this decision could silence many Internet radio stations forever.
Please, for all of the artists, musicians and their fans out in your district, please look into this issue and expose it to wider view.
Sincerely,
The Lighthouse Keeper (Real name provided in letter)
Our musical heritage is being driven into the grave by the RIAA, the record companies, the U.S. government OF BOTH PARTIES, and Clear Channel and other companies of its like. All of these commercial entities, run by Dems and Republicans alike, would be perfectly happy to preside over vanilla advertising conduits across which all Americans see only what these anti-artistic corporate drones and bean counters want you to see and hear. Namely, a never-ending saga of Britney Spears' latest haircut and rehab walkabout, Paris' latest sex video, Nicole and Ashley's latest bouts with anorexia, and Tomkat's prescriptions for how YOU should run YOUR life.
Is this what you want? Look at your kids. This is what is happening right now.
Frankly, the Dems are TERRIBLE on this issue
It is one of the most bitter disappointments of my life that MY Democratic party, including most of its leading lights, actively SUPPORTS this madness and accepts MASSIVE contributions from the recording industry. I am not making this up, people. David Geffen is Obama's biggest backer, remember? And Edgar Bronfman is both a huge Dem contributor and a main beneficiary of (and big lobbyist for) the draconian DMCA. (And a big whiner about piracy, I might add.) And how avidly the Dems fight to kiss the rings of the satraps of Hollywood! I could do another diary on Hillary Clinton's sententious pronunciamentos on popular culture, and the eagerness of Barack Obama to hurl himself into the embrace of these avatars of groupthink. But I frankly don't have the time to deal with mindless foolery.
Piracy and Web Radio
These two things are not linked. Period.
Web radio has nothing to do with piracy. Its primary use domestically and abroad is exposure for music that we would otherwise never hear. Sure, most of what is out there unheard is crud. But where else would you hear lyrics like these:
Swim out to the ocean
Drown your thoughts out at sea
Dip your hands in the water
Same deep water as me...
You've been watching for cloudbursts
You've been praying for rain
Drench your soul in the water
Cleanse your heart of the stain
Cleanse your heart of the stain
- I Am Kloot, The Same Deep Water As Me
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I can say bluntly that pirating music sucks. I cannot speak for others, but I do not do it. A friend recently offered me complete access to his 60 GB MP3 collection and I had to tell him no. I told him, respectfully, that I consider it a moral issue, and that as a musician myself I can't do it. If RIAA had heard that, they would have loved me.
But RIAA can go screw itself. It's not as if those bastards have ever helped anyone in their freakin' lives. Look at the bleak wasteland that is the music scene throughout this country. Barney Kessel, the widely respected jazz guitarist and studio musician, died of brain cancer in San Diego without health insurance, and stopped playing music forever in 1992 after a debilitating stroke, living twelve long years beyond that - the whole time with no health insurance.
The man whom many people consider the greatest jazz guitarist who ever lived, Joe Pass, died basically without a penny to his name and never made more than $30,000 in a year. I know this because he used to call my mother- and father-in-law looking for gigs. I kid you not. It's not as if RIAA ever did anything noble or useful like setting up a pension for musicians in their organization or making sure the old guys like Kessel were minimally taken care of before they died.
This country has a decades-old principle of Fair Use, which essentially means that the record companies were barred by the Supreme Court from imposing copy protection on tape-based media back when that was the state-of-the-art. Those principles have been a bulwark of audiophile and fan-based musical usage ever since. And a sore point of contention for the persecuted record company oligopoly.
Big Radio and Big Record brandish their concern about people recording streaming Web audio as a big reason why they want to impose their fee upon a small, slowly growing market. Such utilities exist. However, it strikes me as a lot of trouble to actually do it, having recently explored a couple of stream-recording packages and tossing them aside as not worth the trouble.
Why am I talking about all this?
Because I have to fight with all the tools at my disposal to keep the corporate Borg from brainwashing my beautiful innocent little girl.
Music is the art that has sustained mankind for hundreds of years. Palestrina, Corelli, Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin. Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday, John Coltrane. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Johnny Cash, and on and on. None of these people were what you'd call normal, or blessed with common sense. But their work brightens our lives. Just about all of them (well, maybe not Gershwin) have one thing in common. They were rebels and serious nonconformists. And they were talented.
And you will never - ever hear any of them on mainstream Clear Channel-style radio. To whole generations of people in this country, many of them are utterly a mystery. It will be all I can do to pass them on to my five-year-old daughter, who is just beginning to be aware that such things exist.
For the homogenization of culture is a form of brainwashing. The U.S. Copyright Board, under the auspices of the DMCA, is trying to force us another step down the road to servitude.
Art is rebellion. Music is rebellion. Remember how boring and vanilla and simply WHITE the American music scene was for most people in the fifties? Popular art then was limited to the whisky-drinking Mafia thug Frank Sinatra and his boozehound cronies. The Chairman of the Board. (Yeah, right.) Everything else was carefully kept underground.
It is barely in the last fifty years that we saw the great outflowering of art in popular music in this country and across the world, heavily influenced by the jazz and blues outlaws of the 40's and 50's
Web radio represents the last rearguard of that movement. Without it, where will we find new music? World music? New reggae/dub releases? Indie rock from Manchester? New jazz that doesn't fit the bland, stultifying Pat Metheny mode of his last ten years of work? (I apologize to Metheny fans, but that's the way I see him now.) Indie rock that is literally never released on one of the major four labels or their subsidiaries?
Call to Action
If the audience on this site, which I believe represents part of the best and finest in the Democratic Party and part of the hope for our country, does not care about this issue and chooses to ignore it and do nothing about it until it is too late, we will all be the less for it. All of us are busy, and busy with important work.
But spare a thought for one of the most precious things that we are fighting for.
Without Web radio, the Pat Boones and Kingston Trios of the 21st Century - replaced now by Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake - will once again hold uninterrupted sway over popular culture, and this time every little mouse hole that people with talent could previously use to escape and carve their little niche will be gone.
Bars and nightclubs, with a very few exceptions, do not pay musicians any more. Musicians pay THEM for the chance to play in their hallowed piss-smelling venues. Musicians handle all the marketing and all the receipts. The only way a musician makes money in this situation, which is extremely common (and one of the reasons I am not even a semi-pro musician) is through getting every friend and acquaintance to come to their gigs. And hope it's enough.
And the hallowed Fillmore? It's owned by Clear Channel. It still books indie bands, sometimes. Maybe not for much longer, if things keep going this way.
I know and have known so many supremely talented people who would give their eyeteeth for a sliver of a regular income from doing what they love. Many of them are people I hold in tremendous esteem and consider to be flawless professionals who work just as hard as anyone and deserve appreciation and a reasonable stipend from the recording industry (or at least health coverage) for their contributions. Or, at the very least, the possibility of being heard. Even the brilliant-but-total-wackos (of which I also knew many), who literally starve for their art because they literally could not do anything else, deserve to have a little bit of hope.
That's what Web radio gives them. A little bit of hope that some people somewhere will know who they are and will somehow support them. Or come to their show when they stagger into town in a broken-down minivan, or buy their MP3s on the Web so they can have hot dogs with their beans this week.
I'm sorry, but I don't see Springsteen and Bono and the rest of the stadium-selling Dem musical avatars having any interest in this at all. They're too big now. Their lyrics about the little guy are just talk as far as I'm concerned. Despite their history, to me they're just posers. I have never heard Bruce or Bono or Dave Matthews or Metallica or anyone else in that position do anything else recently other than whine about piracy. Maybe that's a bit unfair of me to say, but so what?
They got into the system before the drawbridge was pulled up once and for all. They have a vested interest in maintaining the system as it now stands.
And frankly, I think that's screwed.
HOW MUCH MONEY IS ENOUGH?
It's not about piracy. Standing up for Web radio is about simple fairness and justice.
The Democratic Party is supposed to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.
It is supposed to have the backs of the people who are too cursed with talent and too maladjusted to society to play by its rules, but are instead compelled to hole up for 18 hours a day producing art that all of us love to the present day and cherish because those people literally gave up their lives to give it to us.
The Democratic Party is supposed to stand up for the powerless. It is supposed to stand for diversity, for art, for the mad creative impulse, for the people who don't freakin' fit in.
Our party is supposed to protect those things from the crushing hand of government and Big Business.
The Republicans HATE those people and want them to die. And our representatives are actively helping them!
Life is not just about getting and spending - or conforming.. It is about beauty, and art, and music, and the light that emerges when people of like mind share experiences that are not measured by money, that drift away on waves of sound, to be preserved and cherished in memory like a flickering candle of joy.
It is about seeing little children's faces light up when you play and sing a song for them - performed and paid for by volunteers because the schools don't pay for art or drama or music teachers anymore, which they did when I was growing up.
It is not just about fattening David Geffen's bank account. (Or Barack's.)
In the United States, Bill Clinton's horrible DMCA and the U.S. Copyright Board are about to kill the music for real.
Our last defenseless musical artists huddle around flickering campfires scattered in the howling wasteland of American culture, playing their chords and notes of defiance and life. The huge black wolves circle just outside the campfire's light.
WE MUST STEP UP, people!
If you have ever bought a CD in your life, you need to speak out now to your political representatives.
If you have grown bored with listening to your music collection and wondered why no good music ever seems to be available anymore, you need to speak up now.
If you are a musician - in academia, in a bar band, or a dedicated plunker and late-night bar jam participant like I am - you need to speak out now.
If you love music and go to live shows to support music, YOU NEED TO SPEAK UP NOW, MORE THAN EVER!
Please, please spare a few cycles from your busy day.
Please spare a few cycles to try to help those who only want to give us art and beauty without being crushed by the Fascist machine.
Please help.
Thank you for your time spent in this forum.
"I'm not interested in a marketable product: I'm interested in what I know from my life experience to be standards of excellence." - Barney Kessel
