Did the ‘Day of Silence’ Work? Did you even know about it?
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As we have had a day or two to reflect and analyze, did the ‘Day of Silence’ work or was the prepress to little to late? Here is some news from around the web with what people had to say.
But the day-long stream-out was not a unanimous affair. At mid-morning, BetaNews was able to launch streams from AOL Music, with the nation’s largest audience. (Curiously, our anti-spyware software stopped one attempt by a malicious control to take screen shots of us signing in to AOL Music with our screen name - which is something else AOL might like to know about.)
Also, London UK-based Last.fm — which was recently purchased by CBS for $280 million — opted out of today’s protest, though it offered a long explanation with regards to why.
Thousands of webcasters shut down today in protest of new retroactive royalty rates that would drive most of them out of business or force them into lockstep formation with the terrestrial radio stations many of us have learned to tune out. (One of the worst aspects of the new rates that I didn’t mention in the above-linked article is the $500 per-month-per-station minumum payment, which would make customized radio services such as Pandora financially impossible.)
So… is the Day of Silence working (i.e. is Congress going to pass the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would eliminate the minimum fee per channel and charge webcasters the same 7.5%-of-revenue rate enjoyed by satellite radio)?
Internet radio broadcasters Tuesday observed a “Day of Silence” in which they set out to shake up their audiences by turning off their broadcasts and running a vigorous online campaign to rally Congress over new fees they say are unfair.
The After the event reports ether don’t say anything about how well the day went or most of them look like a “after thought” news filer crap.
**Update** Did the ‘Day of Silence’ Work? Did you even know about it? *Part 2*
Tags: General-news-and-Rants
