As commercial radio stations go, KPIG is a small potato. In the caste system of broadcast signals, KPIG is literaly third-rate. Its signal on 107-oink-5 out of Freedom, California (yes, that's the name of the town), puts an okay-at-best signal into Santa Cruz, Monterey, Salinas and other little towns surrounding Monterey Bay in California. But as commercial Web stations go, KPIG is about as big as it gets. Its 128kb MP3 stream is one of the Web's hi-fi music beacons. So are the half dozen or so other streams the station puts out at various speeds for various clients types. And it makes much of Linux and open source "solutions". From its site: "the audio is digitized by a Linux PC with a Soundblaster Live audio card, using the LAME open-source MP3 encoder. The stream is distributed via a Shoutcast server located at the AOL server farm in Dulles, Virginia."
KPIG is also perhaps the only commercial station in the U.S. where the disc jockeys still choose the music, and the community ties are so close it's hard to tell where the station ends and its constituency begins. And yet without irony this chaos produces a Web site that is somehow both artist- and industry-friendly. Every song the station plays is listed, live, on the Web, along with links that make it easy to buy the CD, research the artist, or follow a tour schedule.
Without a doubt, KPIG establishes the highest standard for a combination of commercial success, community involvement, resourceful use of free and open source software, and adaptiveness to a surreally perverse commercial, political and regularory environment. For example, a few months back, when the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) worked up a new deal for voice-over artists that granted a 300% pay premium for ads played over the Net, and agencies began to demand that payment, over 2500 live streams from commercial radio stations were shut down because the broadcasters didn't want to screw with the hassle. At this writing they're still not up. Meanwhile, KPIG adapted by automatically substituting music, announcements or other "content" into the Web stream while national ads ran on the station's local airwaves. It was adaptive itch-scratching of the first order.
KPIG and other live streamers will need even higher powers of adaption over the coming months if any number of post-DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) scenarios play out. We highlight KPIG because it's the biggest canary in this particular coal mine.
At issue at press time (mid-august) is questions over the meaning of this language from the DMCA:
the transmitting entity does not cause to be published, or induce or facilitate the publication, by means of an advance program schedule or prior announcement, the titles of the specific sound recordings to be transmitted, the phonorecords embodying such sound recordings, or, other than for illustrative purposes, the names of the featured recording artists, except that this clause does not disqualify a transmitting entity that makes a prior announcement that a particular artist will be featured within an unspecified future time period....`(iii) the transmission...(IV)is not part of an identifiable program in which performances of sound recordings are rendered in a predetermined order.
Wonder why radio stations don't tell you exactly what they're about to play? You're looking right at the law that requires that restraint. It's intended to keep you from recording whatever is coming up. But there's a larger context here. The music business includes licenses of many kinds — too many to go into here, but suffice it to say that publishers, artists, distributors, radio stations and government and powerful nonprofit representational bodies (e.g. BMI and ASCAP) are all involved in this, and have been for a long time. The DMCA is an attemt to maintain this set of relationshiips, under force of law, in the digital age.
The DMCA is a direct response by an industry and lawmakers to the threat "interactivity" poses both to the record industry, and to the one-way zero-interactivity non-relationship commercial broadcasters have always had with the listeners whose numbers they sell to advertisers.
To put what's going on in context, it helps to know that the free service we call radio — the music and talk transmitted on broadcast bands and picked up by receivers in cars, pockets and homes — generally comes in two forms: commercial and noncommercial. The commercial stations are in the business of selling advertising. As listeners, you're the product. Advertisers buy access to your potential attention to their 30- or 60-second pitches. Music is just bait. You pay nothing for it. The noncommercial stations are in the business (to the extent they resemble a business) of selling their broadcasts directly to listeners, or to business or government bodies that like to "support" those stations for one reason or another.
In neither case are you paying directly for the music you hear. But the stations do pay. Commercial stations pay more, but both commercial and noncommercial stations keep a record of what they play and pay something out to nonprofit organizations like BMI and ASCAP, which represent the artists whose music is being paid. And the proceeds are distributed to the artists.
News is what newspeople say it is, and in the summer there's less of it because fewer newspeople are out there telling us all what's going on. And there's less happening at the sources for the same reasons. News is on holiday.
But Satan never sleeps. Evil lurks wherever massively self-interested producers of commercial goods are busy protecting their incumbent franchises, aided and abbetted by the best laws money can buy. This is what we find lurking under what would be the Webio business — streaming music from and for anybody who wants it — if the music distribution industry and the government let it happen. But the business isn't there right now.. Is it news? Only if you haven't noticed yet what's going on. Since we can't find anybody else in the mainstream press talking about it, here you go.
Commercial stations have a licensing relatinship, compulsory (compelled by the copyright office?) pro forma relationshp between stations and their music suppliers. Government sets the rates. Same goes for noncommercial stations, but at a lower rate. Essentially it allowed artists to participate in the revenue stream of the advertising business that is commercial radio.
The music business includes licenses of many kinds — too many to go into here, but suffice it to say that publishers, artists, distributors, radio stations and government and powerful nonprofit representational bodies (e.g. BMI and ASCAP) are all involved in this, and have been for a long time. The DMCA is an attemt to maintain this set of relationshiips, under force of law, in the digital age.
Effectively the copyright office is finally setting the price per streeamed song both for radio stations that strean online and for internet-only stations. A percentage fee will be imposed on them.
if they give consumers the choice to rate the
Links
DMCA: <http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm>
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=7769
http://www.riaa.org/
LAME <http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/>