Has the Recording Industry Killed the Internet Star?

The concept of radio as a medium for tunes is so a part of the American culture that there aren't many who remember when it wasn't used for music, but for news and information. In any medium-sized city, there are at least a handful of stations, both on the AM and FM sides of the dial and carrying a wide range of music, talk shows, news, information, humor and the occasional contest. And mixed in among most of them are the ubiquitous ads that most of us just tune out: ads for everything from houses to turnips, some funny, some catchy, some terrible.

But alive on another medium is the power of music and news and all the rest, streamed not through space by transmitters, but through the labyrinthine canals of the Internet. Streaming music and video is very much a going concern; estimates of channel traffic vary widely but agree that the thousands of stations that hold music and video in streaming form account for more than a third of the traffic on the Internet at any given time. Some of the widest venues, such as AOL's Radio programming and Pandora.com, command slices above 1% of the entire Internet traffic in their own right.

Until now?

Buried at the heart of Internet radio, including streaming video and audio source material from terrestrial radio, is the question of copyrights. Regular radio has long been immune to copyright infringement; they convinced the sellers of music long ago that the radio medium was one of free promotion, one where the music of the artists could be heard, and from which sales would follow. But the same organization which has orchestrated that masterful move has dealt a stunning blow to the new radio concept of Internet streaming material. Rather than pay for the songs as though they were songs on a radio station, Internet sites must pay for the music as though each song was a performance; the site-holders must pay the artist for every song that is transmitted to every listener, every time.