Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

Internet radio is an important force that allows listeners to avoid the stagnant playlists of commercial radio. It’s helped open doors of the music world by giving its 70 million monthly listeners in the U.S. alone a way to discover acts they might never hear otherwise—music that is essentially shut out of mainstream radio. Internet may have killed the radio star, but it’s also the reason you don’t sit at your desk at work announcing that if you hear “American Pie” one more time you’re going to stick a pencil in your ear.

Yesterday was supposed to be “the day the music dies.” Don’t worry. You didn’t miss a VH1 special on Don McLean. Rather, it’s a mildly clever slogan adopted by the SaveNetRadio Coalition—a group of artists, labels and internet broadcasters fighting the good fight to prevent legitimate music from being wiped off the internet. May 15^th was to be D-day, when new royalty rates for internet radio broadcasters were to take effect, almost instantaneously forcing at least one-third of all internet radio stations into bankruptcy. The new rates were issued in a ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board, part of the Library of Congress, on March 2^nd after a year-long arbitration process.  SoundExchange, the agency responsible for collecting from internet broadcasters, not surprisingly cheered these as “hard-won, fair royalties that artists deserve.”

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