The rising cost of Online Streaming

Today I received an email from Digitally Imported Music services, I have been listening to for quite some time and I do enjoy it.
The email was about the copyright royalty board in the USA imposing new royalty rates from 2016 to 2020 and also a move to eliminate the special royalty rates which existed for small webcasters such as Digitally Imported.
This made me think, I wonder how long is it going to be, until all the independent webcasters are forced out of business, untill all we are able to tune into is big commercial online radio.

As we know, the absolute commercialisation of classic radio over the years has given us the 12 track playlist of 3 minute songs, played over and over again all day every day.
One of the great things about Internet radio is the freedom of musical variety, and not being locked into that 12 track playlist, not having to listen to songs the recording companies lobby radio stations to play.
And just a personal gripe, not having to listen to the morning DJ/s talk a lot of wank about how great and amazing they are. Though some people enjoy this I suppose.

To be honest I‘m not a big listener to mainstream music these days, though I do subscribe to Google Music and I find it quite good.
I also donate to SomaFM, and Kavhi Collective which are fantastic webcasts, and starting in the new year I will become a subscriber to Digitally Imported as well.
I don’t have a problem with paying for good quality services, but this does bring up the issue how much can I afford?

As more online streaming companies ask for donations or subscriptions where do you draw the line? You can’t donate/subscribe to everything and Ad revenue is practically dead as a doornail these days, so the only way these small independent companies can survive is donations and subscribers, and maybe some ad revenue still

Anyway it would be very upsetting to see the absolute commercialisation of online media
and for what I can see it does seem to be slowly going that way :worried:


Just as I wrote this I got a message from SomaFM telling me the same thing, apparently there fees are going up 14 times higher next year.