(U.S.) Internet Radio may be killed off for good with royalty hikes by big compan

The copyright royalty board has decided that over the next few years the royalty rates of music for internet radio with dramatically increase from what it has currently been. These rates have been determined by the RIAA/SoundExchange(Recording Industry of Association of America). This makes it unreasonable for internet radio to remain available to the public and for small web casters to stay in business. And overall hurts the artist and small labels.

I think music is created for marketing pleasure but hiking rates is like killing the goose laying golden eggs. It is short sighted. To benefit a few but detrimental to many. Internet radio has a rapidly increasing audience, and has the chance to help many artists. We experience a lot of new music we otherwise may not have through internet radio.

What do you think of all this?

usually when they spike the rates like that, they are trying to deter something, but i don't know what in this case.

I think the larger companies like AOL who provide music via the internet just want a bigger slice of the pie that they could be getting. It will ultimately just narrow the music we get to listen to, and have the big labels who pay the premiums get the same generic music playing over and over.

This will just drive more people to download music from P2P sites.

thankfully this hasn't happened in Australia yet, so programs such as "national rock n blues show" will continue