Music going down the internet tubes?

Greed almost killed internet radio a while back. The authorities in the federal government who go by the name of Copyright Royalty Board imposed a new fee structure for stations that play music, making it prohibitively expensive for internet niche players (e.g. "all-baroque-all-the-time") to stay on the air. At present, only Congressional action (an oxymoron) can prevent this from happening.

The current situation is best understood if you look at this article.
So the old motivation of greed kills the simple pleasures. Where there's a buck to be made, you can be sure someone in this country will find it. Once again, Big Media takes over and deprives anyone who can't pay from listening or broadcasting.

Apparently corporations don't understand the story about killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

There's plenty of evidence that consumers are more likely to buy music if they have a chance to audition it. When I was twenty something, one of the biggest music stores in Toronto had a whole floor devoted to listening stations where you could (with the help of staff) put on headphones to listen to a potential purchase. Some people, of course, abused that, but most were serious purchasers. And this was years ago.

Now, the music distribution model has changed, and become much more convenient than the old listening station. And music of any type can be downloaded rapidly and wirelessly to your tiny listening device while you're doing something else. We are living in an era when it is no longer necessary to buy a load of claptrap on an album in order to obtain what you really want.

The notion that royalties must be set in such a way that only the corporations survive is so quintessentially stupid that it is astounding. Music does not survive when nobody can hear it. It is essential to the culture of any civilized country. Put a prohibitive price in place and you penalize the populace. And another goose gets killed.

An end will come. It may be that when we can no longer afford oil, sometime in the next two years at the current rate, we'll have no means of churning out the plastic for CDs and DVDs. But it seems to me that before that happens, the music business will have killed the affordability of its own product in any case. Way to go, you greedy idiots.

But until that happens, why not download and install a good internet radio player like Screamer Radio, or find a Mac equivalent, or just go to a website like Accuradio.com, select a genre of your choice, and listen to the amazing works of Bach or the Beatles, or Benny Goodman while you still can?

"The day the music died" may well be on its way unless saner heads prevail.