Help Save Internet Radio

My partner often tells me that if it wasn't for me, she'd still be listening to Sarah McLachlan and thinking she was cool. Not that there's anything wrong with Sarah- the Lilith Fair was one of the higlights of my late adolescence, the height of all things "grrl power!" But musicians like Sleater-Kinney, Belle and Sebastian, Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, and Yo La Tengo probably wouldn't have crossed her radar screen were it not for my influence. I chalk up my serious musical chops to a couple of crucial points: 1. my Dad, who raised me on James Taylor, Elvis Costello, the Who, and the Beatles (the theme of my college admissions essay was the Abbey Road album), whose LP collection is a thing of enormous beauty (something completely lost in the world of CDs and MP3s) and 2. growing up in Nashville, TN; aka Music City; aka Nashvegas. I attended my first concert at age 6 (the Bangles, with my Dad, who was infatuated with Suzanna Hoffs Michael Steele at the time) and spent a large portion of the 18 years before I left for college in venues watching live performances ranging from Mary Chapin Carpenter to REM to James Brown. Nashville was home to high school punk rock bands, all-ages shows, and a great local radio station, Lightning 100. Though it was a commercial station, it exposed me to independent artists, from Lucinda Williams, Beth Orton, and Patty Griffin to Ben Folds and David Mead. When I left for Philadelphia I discovered WXPN, a non-commercial public radio station that played fantastic music. Home to the nationally syndicated radio program World Cafe, hosted by David Dye. I quickly became addicted to XPN- I listened constantly; it was the soundtrack to my time in Philadelphia. The diversity of the music and the lack of commercialism was something that, even in Nashville, I had never experienced before. After leaving Philly I remained an avid listener, now to the on-line stream, and I even became a member of the station last fall. XPN keeps me musically sane in a time of, well, let's just say that if I heard Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" one more time I think my head would explode.

So now for the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say. Recently the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decided to exponentially raise the fees charged for streaming music over the Internet. These fees will go into effect July 15th and stations will have to retroactively pay fees for the last 17 months. The increase is in fact so large that the price-tag is higher than what most stations even make off of these streams. The CRB's decision will have a profound impact on independent and public radio stations, like XPN, who work to promote local and up-and-coming artists. XPN believes that musicians should be paid for their work, but the fee increase will unfortunately harm the small-name musicians and the radio stations that play them- and not the Britney's and Beyonce's of the music business. Working with allies in Congress, the House has introduced HR 2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would override the CRB's decision and set the fees at the same level as satellite radio (7.5% of revenue). There will be a debate this week in the House Small Business Subcommittee about the potential effects of the CRB increase. In an effort to raise awareness, XPN and many other stations will be participating in Internet Radio Day of Silence on Tuesday, June 26th. You can log onto XPN's website and sign their petition on Tuesday. More information can be found at SaveNetRadio.