Slowly, but surely, internet radio broadcasters are shutting down. As I mentioned last week, the Librarian of Congress was due to announce his decision on performance rates for internet radio on June 20.

Well, sure enough, the announcement came. Wired — delusionally deciding that this is a good thing — announced “Webcasters Fees Slashed in Half”. And it’s true: they were slashed in half, from US.14¢ per song per listener to US.07¢ per song per listener. Which means that the 1,000 listener per hour station which has been broadcasting for the past 3 years will only owe a quarter-million US dollars in royalties, rather than a half-million! Wowee!

Stations are disappearing quietly. SomaFM‘s home page reads “Killed by the RIAA. June 20th, 2002″. NetRockRadio is silent, their home page declaring June 20th, 2002 as “The Day the Music Died.” MoreMusicRadio says, “It’s Sad to Say Goodbye.” Tag’s TranceTrip says, “Off the Air.” Perkigoth says, “Killed by CARP, Harassed to death by SESAC!” The Downbeat says, “One day RIAA will be seen for what they truely are…” Flaresound says, “Shutdown because of RIAA on June 22nd, 2002.” There will be many more.

RIAA says its not their responsibility to “subsidize the webcasting businesses of multi-billion dollar companies like Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks and Viacom.” (Strangely enough, AOL & Viacom are major members of the RIAA, with AOL/Time Warner providing nearly 20% of their yearly budget, according to the folks at MonkeyRadio — another silent station, whose founder happens to be the developer of WinAmp, now owned by AOL.) Strange, how they consider that allowing internet radio stations to expose their music to potential buyers is a subsidy, when this is exactly the same thing they provide to terrestrial and satellite radio. In fact, they illegally pay the broadcasters to play their records over the public airwaves which we license to the broadcasters for much less than their true value. (Check out the pitifully small FCC license fees paid by even the largest radio stations: WCBS-AM in New York, reaching 14.5 million potential listeners paid just US$4,550 for its broadcast license last year!)

With a bit of “too-little-too-late”, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who sold his Broadcast.com to Yahoo for US$5B, told RAIN that the deal his company was negotiating with the RIAA was was “designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a ‘percentage-of-revenue’ to survive, couldn’t.” This was the deal which the Copyright panel used as the basis for its determination, since it was the only deal out there! And then, just to rub a little salt in the wound, Yahoo announced today that it was going to close some of its streaming audio sites. Although they claim that the CARP ruling had nothing to do with it, RAIN reports that the negotiated deal with the RIAA expired at the end of 2001.

So what’s the future? Well, Canada is proposing legislation similar in effect to the CARP royalty structure: C$0.25 per month per listener, payable to SOCAN, the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA. RantRadio is spearheading the fight to keep alive diversity in internet radio in our northern neighbor. I’m not sure what’s happening in Europe right now — the situation there may be a little different, since radio stations are mainly state-owned and therefore not as fearful of internet upstarts as their brothers in the US.

The most important thing you can do is write your Congress-people. There’s a form letter which you can have faxed to you Senators & Representatives, as well as other actions you can take, listed at SaveInternetRadio.org.

rogue: n. 1. a person who is unscrupulous…
especially someone who is nonetheless likable

My cousin Brian, a second-cousin on my father’s side, died yesterday of heart-failure at 39 years old. We were close at one time, in that strange way cousins have of being close, even though they might see each other only once a year. My sister was in love with him, I think.

He was a great guy, trim and wiry, with reddish hair, freckles, and a smart-aleck grin; there was always a cigarette in his hand, and one eye squinting to keep out the smoke. He was a Wild One, a Rebel. He always greeted me with one hand in a handshake and one hand clapping my back.

He was married once, to a beautiful girl from Colombia; I never really got a clear story of how he met her. She was an Indian, from a small village, and he brought her up here, married her, had a child by her, and was divorced by her. She’d bought into the American thing quickly and wanted it all: the house, the yard, the money, the steady stability which wasn’t in Brian’s nature.

His mother, unwilling to be divorced from her grandson, gave the ex-wife everything she wanted after the split-up — new teeth, a boob-job, a home, a car — under constant threat of the adored child disappearing with his mother back into the jungles of South America. Or, that was the fear anyway; we all knew that this new American had spent too much time in the big city to ever settle for the farm again.

Brian lived on the margins before the marriage and after the divorce, with a feral gift for survival, and the ability to charm you out of your possessions as you thanked him for it. He squatted in houses and buildings, abandoned, but not yet torn down. He fixed cars which he found or bought, then sold them, somehow coming up with titles and papers which must’ve been false, but passed for legit. I don’t think he owned anything but his clothes.

There were drugs, too. And though, between he and me there was never anything more than a joint or two at family occasions, an offer of coke once or twice — when I heard he’d died, that was the first thing Jenn and I thought of. I knew, without any evidence, that there were more drugs there than just for personal comsumption. My sister and my father both said, “I can only guess what caused the heart attack…” I doubt we’ll ever know.

Still, his mother said, “He was cleaning up his act. He’d just gotten a new job. He was looking for an apartment.” You hear that so often.

He finished high school, then went for a while to a car mechanic school. He worked with his hands, like his grandfather who worked as a sanitation man for New York City all his life. They both gambled and cursed and bent the rules and loved their families and made their own way and never asked anyone for anything. Only, his grandfather — my great-uncle — died in his sleep, late in his 80s.

Brian was street-smart and worldly-wise, a maverick in a family of college degrees and professional certificates. A poor romantic figure, a starving artist of existence.

So long, Brian.