I presume real radio stations have to pay a fortune to try and prevent people home taping.

Stupid insane record company types

Don't these RIAA knobs realize that it's physically impossible to prevent the recording of audio?

I would certainly miss Internet radio music stations, but on the other hand I would be fully behind the Internet radio stations if they just told the record industry to shove, and all shut up shop.

With no Internet music radio left, the greedy music companies would be unable to throttle this golden goose any longer, and the blame for the trashing of the technology would sit fairly and squarely on them too.

That sounds worryingly like a custom player and DRM infection to me... Just the kind of thing we thought the music industry had realised wasn't making it any friends.

Here's a little tip for you music industry. People like to be able to move their music between devices, so DRM won't make you friends. Plus whenever you use it, you never provide the tools so it can be played on Linux. Unfortunately for you, the Linux world is populated but the techie savvy crowd, who quickly make your protection look stupid. This knowledge soon "leaks" across to the other platforms, and soon we're all happily ripping/unlocking movies, tracks etc, just like we had been for years before.

Will they ever learn... Doubtful.

How pitiful.

If you can hear the sound coming through your speakers - and what good would internet radio be if you couldn't? - you can record it.

Even a simple audio jack leading from your audio out port to your line in will do the job perfectly well!

Why won't these people understand that you cannot prevent people recording what they want to record?

Broadcast radio don't even pay this royalty

... first you have to make it illegal to own two computers, or at least to have a line in socket on one and a headphone socket on the other.

As long as people have the ability to record audio going through their PC soundcard, it will be impossible to prevent streamripping. Adding DRM doesn't stop the ability to run a sound recording application to record the track as it plays back. This is why I dislike DRM, because it just prevents one aspect of illegally sharing and distributing music and video - and yet so much effort and money is put into running and supporting it. Dum dum.

Don't know about elsewhere, but in the UK royalties are paid by radio stations, pubs, bars, stores.

By a strange coincidence, the UK (as a whole) is one of the leading down-loaders of copyright infringed music (pirated sounds like its a crime, doesn't it, instead of a civil offence).

Equally coincidentally, the UK has one of the largest increases of CD sales year-on-year of anywhere.

What do they propose? Because from what I've seen, most already crossfade tracks to prevent clean rips. People who are happy with the crap at one end and cutoff at the other end are highly unlikely to mind having lowered quality from recording the audio being played back.

Result: Anything beyond crossfades would be pointless.

Also, I'm a Linux user, so any DRM would likely break things for me.

totally f'd. the record companies seem to think people but cds because they have pretty covers. radio stations are the best resource for spreading the word so people will buy. this should be taken into account when the royalties fee is applied. if a station can't operate because royalties are too high, something is definitely wrong there.

I seem to remember that this increase was pushed by over the air broadcasters because they felt like competition with internet broadcasters was unfair, so we can't blame this completely on the RIAA.

Why don't all these internet radio stations simply shift their servers off shore. End of story. All taxes will then go to some carribean island and the RIAA will have no control whatsoever over the radio stations. Sounds good to me!

..the greedy recording industry tries to squeeze more money out of stations which perversely, actually generate income for them by listeners subsequently buying music they hear.

I for one stopped buying CD's long ago due to the ever increasing pathetic use of DRM and other measures trying to force me to listen to my music how they wanted me too. Thank heavens Sony BMG and others do not make cars - they would only work on one road, SonyBMG would know exactly where you went, only run for 2 weeks and if you try to lend it to your neighbour to borrow, you would get arrested.

When are these companies going to get the message that they are in fact hurting there own business by such idiotic measures?

Quoted from the web:

" Here's an illustrative story about what can happen when the content-

industry tail tries to wag the dog. About 10-15 years ago, music

companies told a bunch of NZ TV stations that they had to pay fees in

order to screen music videos. The TV stations disagreed, saying that

they were providing free advertising for the music companies, and if

they didn't like that then they'd simply stop playing music videos. So

they stopped playing all music videos.

After a few weeks, cracks stated to appear as the music companies

realised just how badly they needed the TV channels. One of the music

companies bought an entire prime-time advertising block (at phenomenal

cost, this wasn't a single 30-second slot but every slot in an entire

prime-time ad break) just to play one single new music video.

Shortly afterwards, music videos reappeared on TV. The details of the

settlement were never made public, but I imagine it consisted of a

bunch of music company execs on their knees begging the TV stations to

start playing music videos again and let's please never bring this

matter up again."

This is exactly what needs to happen with SONY BMG etc.

Take a look at

http://www.musictrace.de/technologies/watermarking.en.htm

The alteration of the audio signal even survives recording with a microphone apparently. While this doesn't prevent copying, it does clearly identify the source. If web radio stations were obliged to add such watermarks to their output, they would end up in trouble if significant amounts of their output turned up on the P2P networks.

Theft of promo CDs sent ot radio stations was almost eliminated by this technology.

I agree with the general feeling here, the record companies need all of the broadcasting media much more than the media need them. so tell the record co's to shove it and wait till they come back with a better proposal.

Just have a DJ talk through the first and last 15 seconds of the track. Whilst cross fading still allows you to automatically rip with a few seconds of garbage at either end it would be pretty hard to put up with 15 seconds of arsehole at either end.....

Why the concern anyway. They don't care about satellite radio ripping and they charge sat radio less.

That's one of the arguments, Internet radio should be charged the same rate and treated the same as sat radio.

>>"If web radio stations were obliged to add such watermarks to their output, they would end up in trouble if significant amounts of their output turned up on the P2P networks.

Theft of promo CDs sent to radio stations was almost eliminated by this technology."

Unless a web station was individually watermarking each stream (to enable the end user to be identified), watermarking would seem to have little use.

If a track is recorded by a user from station A, while also being streanmed from stations B to Z, you can't really blame station A unless they are making copying less difficult than the other stations are, since the user could presumably just as easily have recorded the music from some other station.

It's not like trying to find out who is passing review copies of a CD onto a dodgy mate when the content could not have escaped without an identifiable person failing to do what they had agreed to do in terms of protecting it.

>>"I for one stopped buying CD's long ago due to the ever increasing pathetic use of DRM and other measures trying to force me to listen to my music how they wanted me too."

Is there really much DRM happening with CDs? (I haven't noticed it infecting any CDs I've bought).

Apart from DRM, what 'other measures' are there to prevent a CD buyer doing precisely what they want with the music they buy?

If *not* buying CDs, what better [legal, even more DRM-free] ways are there to acquire music?

A skeptic might wonder if a "CDs == DRM and other music control measures" argument was a convenient (if pretty unsound) excuse for piracy.

"Is there really much DRM happening with CDs?"

Mostly on Asian imports I find (e.g. from cd-wow).

It seems if we pay twice the price for UK CDs we don't get DRM.

Thing is the poor quality of internet downloads and DRM on those downloads actually encourages me to buy CDs and rip them myself. I get them for £5 to £8 average, have a physical CD and booklet, rip to lossless format and then play lossless on my HiFi or convert to MP3 for portable.

I won't go for Internet downloads until they match the quality of CD and are portable.