The law isn't necessarily asinine, it's just a result of lobbying by the recording industry, music publishers, songwriters, etc. etc. It's just politics. All one has to do is use Google and you can find plenty of griping by songwriters and musicians about the low royalties from streamed music.
Because of that, recently they jacked up the royalty for all streamed music which will probably drive some streams out of business. Some companies like IHeartMedia have negotiated their own royalty, but the fact is that streaming radio is slowly getting away from the panacea it once was.
Many stations geo-fence, to keep people from outside their primary metro from listening. The reason being the costs to stream are high, and they pay more to their internet provider for every extra listener who logs in. And advertisers don't care if a station has listeners across the country. It's all targeted to the local demos in the local metro. So more and more stations geo-fence to save costs.
When online radio was first promoted, it was going to be the great new way to listen to radio. Stations promoted their "worldwide" potential audience. It was going to change radio forever. Then came geo-blocking and geo-fencing.
I have Tune In on my tablet. I used to receive a lot of stations using that app.
But lately I'm getting more stations that will appear on the screen, but you just get an advertisement (that naturally takes a bit to load and lasts about 30 seconds) before you get the increasingly standard "we're sorry, the station you have dialed up is not streaming / not streaming to your area..." etc. etc.
Stuff like that is keeping over the air radio alive. It's free, and they don't geo-fence.
Topic: Pirate Radio: Spawned by Copyright Idiocy? (Read 1560 times)
