The recent ruling by the US Copyright Royalty Board creates a dire situation for small, independent purveyors of streaming Internet music. I am a composer myself and certainly want to be compensated for my work but I believe this decision is not in the best interest of artists, record labels, or the audience.
The music industry has become so centralized in recent years that the opportunities for new music discovery are shrinking daily. Internet radio has opened an array of new possibilities. It is a medium that is in its infancy and could provide a powerful balance to the corporate forces of the music industry. Unfortunately, this ruling will most likely be the end of the independent Internet radio provider. This is a bad thing.
I happen to believe that people who are not musicians or hard-care music fans have a much broader appreciation of music than the record industry thinks. The public is starving for access to diverse, high quality music. Eclectic music programming like that provided by Santa Monica based KCRW is an oasis in the desert to many of us.
New music discovery is key not only to the growth of the audience but also to the industry itself. The record business has become so large and cumbersome, and so philosophically driven by the sound-alike hit mentality, that there are no longer viable business models that distribute music and provide discovery tools (such as radio and Internet radio) for anything on a scale less than gargantuan. This bloated reality has created the decline the industry is currently suffering. Without discovering and nurturing new talent, the industry will die. Artists like Patty Larkin, Bill Frisell and Oliver Mtukudzi will probably never go platinum, but they will create high quality art for decades and their audiences are fiercely loyal. We desperately need business models that will support an eclectic array of new music.
Radio has traditionally functioned as the key marketing arm for the record industry. Internet radio and music discovery systems like Pandora provide the general public information that is available nowhere else. Streaming radio creates the possibility of distributing eclectic music programming from sources such as KCRW, beyond the local market. For the struggling record industry, the long-term potential benefits of streaming Internet music are huge. It would be a shame to see this opportunity destroyed by short-term thinking. The losers will be not only the Internet radio providers, but also more importantly, independent artists and the fans who love their music.
