It's All About...

saving internet radio.

Internet radio has had a few rough, industry-destroying kind of months.

In early March, new royalty rates were set that would decimate most Web casting operations. The Copyright Royalty Board decided rates will increase from .07 cents per song streamed to .19 cents per song by 2010. (Smaller operations that paid royalties out of their revenue have lost the option to do so.) That kind of jump in costs could kill off plenty of the Web casters, but there was still hope.

Until Monday, anyway, when a panel of copyright judges tossed out requests to review the changes. So begins another battle between owners of music and listeners of music.

What this means for you depends on how you listen.

Those Internet radio stations listed on iTunes? Yes, they will be impacted.

Web casters like WOXY and SomaFM and Radio Paradise? You betcha. (Many thanks to Alison for her devotion to the issue and her fabulous Radio Paradise recommendation.)

Commercial and public radio stations that stream music on their Web sites? Yup.

Song-hunting services like Pandora? Indeed, yes. (Last.fm users like myself will be spared, according to PC World, because Last.fm is based outside the United States.)

Here are several sites that offer information on the issue from both sides. Read, decide and listen carefully.

SaveNetRadio.org, a coalition to save Internet radio.

SoundExchange, a former division of the RIAA that is pushing for increased rates.

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Read and meet: Dan Gediman of This I Believe.
Dan, a producer for the Louisville-based public radio segment, will be at the Bluegrass Festival of Books on Saturday with the collection of essays that have appeared on the radio. He and Kentucky poet Frank X Walker, who contributed an essay that appears in the book, will speak during a panel at 4 p.m. in Lexington Center.

Vote: It's time to pick the prom jewelry.
You picked the dress, the tux, the hair and the flowers. Now pick among three sets of accessories that Amber McKinley will wear to prom at Tates Creek High School on May 12. Voting closes at noon on Thursday.

It's all about turning off the iPod (gasp!) and listening to the radio.

 
    Louisville native and public radio personality Bob Edwards (picture above in the WUKY studio in 2004) spent time in Eastern Kentucky his year, reporting an hour-long documentary on mountain top removal. He interviewed locals, coal company officials and interested parties like Erik Reece and Wendell Berry. You can listen to a promo of the show here.

   The full documentary will be on The Bob Edwards Show at 8 a.m. Friday (and replayed several times later) on XM radio channel 133, or on Bob Edwards Weekend at 7 a.m. Saturday on WEKU. (Thursday's show on XM also features an interview with the author of Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future.)   You'll also be able to get it through iTunes or Audible.

     Maybe afterward, we can all catch a showing of An Inconvenient Truth, and discuss over lattes how ignorance isn't actually blissful.

    Now, for something more light-hearted, check out WMMT 88.7-FM tonight at 9 p.m. for Spaceship of Fools! (You can also listen online here.)  I'll be visiting the show tonight to share and discuss three songs I labored to choose.

    Really, do you have any idea how hard it is to look over the 17 kajillion songs on iTunes and find three that you're grooving on so greatly that you want others to hear? Ugh...it was a ridiculous time of wishy-washy High Fidelity-ish turmoil, but you can hear the fruits of the labor tonight.

It's all about the big 1-0.

This American Life is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week by broadcasting its very first episode; "It aired so long ago that we weren't even called This American Life. We were called Your Radio Playhouse, and we were so unknown and unfamous we got put on hold during our own interviews," the Web site says.

Kudos to you, TAL, for keeping me amused on long car trips and bringing people like David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and Dan Savage to public consciousness.

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Eat: EVERYTHING. It's Thanksgiving!

Gossip: About Tom Cruise's sonogram machine. I understand that the end of the Lachey/Simpson marriage is the celeb story of the day, but I'm personally more interested in the reasons why Katie Holmes can't get her ultrasound from a doctor like all the other pregnant ladies.