One of my favorite internet radio stations is bluegrassradio.org. It’s available via iTunes or just by going to the web site and clicking on listen. But don’t get to liking this wonderful station; Clyde Scott has announced that he is shutting the service down on April 1st. Why you ask is he shutting down? Our friends at the Bluegrass Blog may have some answers with a quote from Clyde:
“With some of the decisions being made in our Capitol, I see a better investment in my grand children than this station. They will need all the help they can get in the future. Bluegrass Radio has been by far the most successful bluegrass music stream in the history of internet radio. For that we are grateful. The friends I have made over the last five years will last a lifetime for me. The financial support has always been there for us so it is not a financial decision. I’m just tired of the fight.”
I don’t know how closely you have followed the Internet radio troubles the last few months, but congress came really close to making it impossible for these stations to exist last fall. There was a ruling from the Copyright Royalty Board that would have set mandatory fees that these stations would need to pay for each stream that they fed. Congress came thru with the “ The Webcaster Settlement Act” which allows each entitysuch as DiMA to negotiate it’s own rates with SoundExchange instead of paying a mandatory exhorberant rate.
Now we come to last month. They were still negotiating and it fell apart. Don’t get me wrong, I think that artists and inventors should get paid for their work, I just think that there has to be some vision so that delivery mechanisms such as Internet radio have a chance to grow. It provides a whole new group of listeners for their content and a new market for the artists.
So now you may understand why Clyde is calling it quits, he wants to spend time with something where he can affect change, not in the wonderful world of lawyers and accountants.
Later,
matt
