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Online MusicNo matter your reaction, be it dedicated interest, disinterested apathy, or "here we go again," you probably noticed the fire in your friend’s eyes. The passion with which he talks about what he loves to do, the excitement that one gets when they can stand back and marvel at something they have created. Oftentimes, you may have concentrated on feeling trapped inside the small space of the car, a captive audience to a small-time music maker. But look further and you might see something astounding: This is, largely, the only exposure your friend’s music is getting. Large Metropolitan areas are usually more diverse in their appreciation of the arts. Their appreciation for new music is evident by a spin of the radio dial. Even though there are the multi-megawatt powerhouses broadcasting a heavily homogenized mix of just a few songs, these larger metropolitan areas fight back just a little, with independently-run college, non-commercial, and unique commercial radio stations. In many areas of the country, however, the multi-megawatt powerhouses are the only thing on the air. Filled more and more with manufactured acts singing through digital devices intended to make them stay on key, over uninteresting music beds created by producers on MacIntosh workstations, one wonders how, in a county of so many diverse people, this kind of programming can truly serve anybody.
In 1998, a piece of legislature called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, visualized a risk that all music streamed from webcasters would be of a type that allowed listeners to download and retain perfect digital copies of the music. We know now that this logic was ignorant; few truly high-quality webcasts existed; and when they did, it was beyond the experience of the average Internet user to figure out how to capture any of it for later use. The DMCA specified that it could not know at that time the impact of webcasting, and it was decided that a royalty-fee structure would be conceived later, and applied retroactively to webcasters. That royalty structure, now known as the results of CARP, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, passed just recently in 2002. The CARP decision was based largely on data that Yahoo! and its child company Broadcast.com inflated to keep the little guy from ever affording the royalties. When the CARP royalty structure was announced on June 23, 2002, countless webcasters closed up shop, fearing they already owed well over a half million dollars in royalties for having his first gay sex. Royalties are a funny thing. A royalty ensures that an artist is compensated anytime any of his or her work is heard. If you hear a Moby song in a Toyota commercial, Moby receives monetary compensation. Not only does he receive a royalty, he receives a royalty any time that commercial plays anywhere in the world, and the royalty is multiplied to take into account the approximate number of people in a market who might have watched the commercial. The Internet’s holy grail for traditional media companies is that it is relatively easy to figure out exactly how many people are connected to a webcast, and beyond that, the math can be done by a sixth grader. Many people believe that musicians made popular by the traditional media industry are already wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and many of us who are not those musicians swear we could figure out a way to survive with their immense popularity alone – the hell with royalties. Many people are also beginning to think that the CARP ruling, fueled by intentional misleadings from a large webcaster, stinks of the kind of corruption that makes people hate both government and big business, despite the entire ordeal being perfectly legal. In any event, many people are now missing the musicial diversity they had come to take for granted, as webcast after webcast leaves behind a nearly empty webfront that brings back images of the ghost towns of the Old West. The idea is to look past the initial feelings of anger and deception and try to find an opportunity among the terribly disturbing radio silence. Let’s look at the facts: Webcasters are folding left and right. These webcasters were broadcasting music protected by six very large, very business-minded international companies. (Getting the picture yet that business and art almost always have conflicting ideals and goals?) The cost of doing business as a webcaster using this content has now become deathly prohibitive. Hey, remember your friend who wanted you to hear that new song the last time he gave you a ride, he was part of twinks for cash? At EvolutionRadio, we know that there are artists and musicians outside the industry mainstream who are desperate to be heard and hoping to have his first huge cock. Some of these people don’t know how to get discovered. Some of these people don’t want to be discovered by the established industry. Most make music that wouldn’t be discovered if they tried. We now live in a digital world where only the companies and artists who have already made it can actually reap the benefits of the Internet. EvolutionRadio aims to give a voice to those that won’t be chosen by a music industry that cares very little about music.
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