If you've been reading up on your news aggregator, you've noticed that
internet radio costs skyrocketed. What you may have wondered is why? I've thrown together a few theories as towards why. Essentially, it all comes down to various corporations lobbying politicians with hidden motives to stomping out fair use, anti-piracy, and anti-competition.
..:: Theory 1: Stomp Out Fair Use in Streaming
Streaming technologies are nothing new, especially to the consumer. The idea is that you can use streaming to get your media out of your home and onto your laptop or other portable device. It's incredibly easy to set up
gnump3d on a ubuntu box (1 line: sudo apt-get install gnump3d), and it's fairly easy to set up icecast. There's even Slingbox, a commercial drop-in device that has many streaming technologies embedded. iTV/Tunes and xbox360/vista media center will allow streaming also.
It's clear from the
CRB's decision [ pdf ] that the regulation will only apply to
digital public performances. However, all of the technologies listed above can be used with minimal modifications to stream to the public, and most of them will stream to the public straight out of the box. Essentially, another method of using your own media under the guise of fair use will have been made illegal under contributory infringment.
With the new internet radio law, streaming audio from your own home to your own laptop would require one of these new internet radio licenses (at $500 to start).
Buying Slingbox or setting up icecast without paying the fee would be like using kazaa. The labels will argue that these technologies are designed specifically to circumvent the law, even though the law was made after these technologies.
At first, it would seem that this would only be applied to RIAA copyrighted content. However, RIAA content making up a substantial amount of the content out there was enough reason to shut down napster1, and this was also reason enough for the developers of kazaa, grokster, and many other p2p applications to be sued into oblivion for contributory copyright infringement. This was entirely despite the legal uses of this software. Programs implementing the bittorrent protocol seem to not have been sued to pieces because they simply don't advertise much, and very few have ads to bring in revenue.
I've already argued that
DRM is not about piracy, and that the recording industry is merely trying to destroy fair use and then sell it right back to you. This is just another attempt.
..:: Theory 2: Anti-Piracy
I've already outlined how easy it is
save mp3s from internet radio. StreamRipper will even split the mp3s to different songs for you. Leave StreamRipper on for a week on a Top 40 station and you will have every current hit song in mp3 format and more. Just delete the ones you don't like. And, for now, this isn't even illegal. Even if it was, there's absolutely nothing the RIAA can do to detect this. Since the ripping happens solely and completely on your own computer, no one can tell whether you're ripping or just listening. The only way for the RIAA to stop this is to kill internet radio. Replacing it with something more secure would take an entire reworking of the streaming model that would require inherent DRM in the operating system, just like
Vista.
I'm not saying this is legal, but no court has said it's illegal. The lack of a court decision in intellectual property litigation is the difference between "so sue me" and "let's talk". Further, enforcing the law in respect to this is completely impossible. Everything happens completely after the user has received the information. However, lack of foresight and the ability for the old industry to adapt is no reason to completely decimate a rising industry.
Additionally, StreamRipping is to internet radio as Tivo is to television. Both take an incoming content format and split it up into discrete blocks based on publicly available scheduling information. Both allow the user to repeatedly consume discrete programs an unlimited number of times at no cost, for eternity. StreamRipping is merely Tivo for radio, and Tivo has already been declared a legal use of timeshifting technologies.
..:: Theory 3: Anti-Competition
Everyone can see that if you're listening to some internet radio station (shameless plug for
m1live and
generation trance), you aren't necessarily listening to RIAA music. It's a simple concept: more stations = more competition. Internet radio is substantially better than broadcast radio for many reasons. In comparing the two, check the limitations on broadcast radio:
- Most consumer FM radios go from 88.0 to 108.0 kHz. Assuming the receiver is good enough to differentiate on the tens place, that's a limitation of 200 stations at best (most areas only license the odd numbers, which is only 99 stations).
- You'll also need a broadcasting antenna, at least some 20+ feet tall that you can erect in your area. Many apartment complexes and condos forbid directv satellite dishes while homeowners' associations prohibit basketball poles. Putting up an antenna seems incredibly unlikely.
- When the electric bill arrives, prepare for some pain. I can't even imagine what a broadcast antenna costs to keep powered.
In other words, the barrier to entry in the FM radio industry is incredibly high, and you'll always be limited by geography. Without some syndication technology (rebroadcasting a signal using another antenna installation elsewhere), your signal is typically limited to your own city or county.
On the flipside, I can set up an internet radio station. So can you. In fact, all you need is
bandwidth. Check out
amazon s3, which is protocol agnostic, has no setup fees, no tiered payment system, and no minimal usage. S3 will broadcast at $0.20/gb. The standard unit time in radio is the quarter hour, and the standard bitrate in internet radio transmissions is 128kbps MP3 encoding. Using a little dimensional analysis, we're going to figure out the cost in USD per quarter hour with S3. First, we get the amount of gb sent per quarter hour for one listener:
128kb 60s 1mb 1gb
--------- x --------- x -------- x -------- x 15 min = 0.109863281 gb in a quarter hour
1s 1min 1024kb 1024mb
For Amazon's S3 hosting, the rate is $0.20/gb, so multiplying this times the result above, we get the cost per quarter hour:
0.109863281gb $0.20 0.021972656 $
---------------- x -------- = ---------------
quarter hr 1gb quarter hr
That's a little over 2 cents per quarter hour per listener for broadcast time, but you only pay exactly for what you use. Let's check out a different bandwidth provider that has tiered hosting. For example,
dreamhost will give you 1.71 TB in a month for $8. Now, check the cost per quarter hour with this plan:
$8 1tb 0.109863281gb 0.000501934 $
-------- x -------- x --------------- = ---------------
1.71tb 1024gb quarter hr quarter hr
That's ridiculously low. If you were setting up an internet radio station, you'd probably want to go with colocation, but this gives you an idea of how little the bandwidth costs.
Further, if we limit domain names to merely 32 characters (although technologically, they can be much longer), with the characters in the space of alphanumeric and the dash (totalling 37 different characters), that's 37^32 different possible radio stations. That's just for .coms. When you account for .com, .net, .fm, and .org, you multiply that by 4 and have some ungodly astronomical number of possible stations.
It is a basic rule of any industry that
competition is bad for profits. Because the barrier to entry in internet radio is so unbelievably low, those involved in the industry (RIAA, ClearChannel, ASCAP, Sirius/XM) have every interest in killing it before it gets off the ground. Even nastier is the prospect that as WiMax rolls out, and as cities go wireless, handhelds with wireless technologies enabling internet access will provide even better offerings than satellite radio.
Regardless of the medium, radio is free to the consumer, and paid for by advertising dollars. With FM radio, everything is a projection that can easily be clouded by marketingspeak. However, internet radio can be measured exactly by companies like
ando media. With the numbers available, advertisers will want much lower rates, because the radio companies won't be able to inflate estimates of listeners using marketing-speak. The same exact thing has already happened to the consumer publishing industries. Magazines and newspapers are a dying breed, and internet advertisers typically only pay for click-throughs. Internet radio will grossly lower the advertising costs, so radio broadcasters want to keep internet radio off the mainstream radar.
Additionally, the RIAA pays ClearChannel and other radio channels money to play their music. You'd think it was the other way around, but with the syndication and oligopoly in radio (between ClearChannel, Viacom, and a few others), the record labels found out that if they didn't pay to get their music played, they wouldn't sell a single album. The idea behind killing internet radio now is that it won't be another medium that the industry has to dump money into in order to monopolize playtime. As stated above, there can only be 99 stations in an area, and these are split between genres. It is conceivable that a label or group of labels can buy out ALL of the airtime on entire cities' playlists (that's why you hear top 40 all day every day on most stations). However, on internet radio, this is just impossible with the astronomical number of available radio stations.
..:: Conclusion
The entire music industry is broken, and everyone involved is trying to guarantee profits. This law is just another attempt at profit protection with the cost paid by the consumer. This is even more reason to stop listening to RIAA music altogether. If the music you listen to is produced by them, you're only feeding the system.
Post Last Updated: Mar 5, 2007 8:36 pm
