StickiWidgets

The music industry is at it again. On Friday March 2nd, the U.S. government (specifically, the Copyright Royalty Board, or “CRB”) announced the new royalty rates Internet radio webcasters must pay to license the music they play for the years 2006-2010 (the fees are retroactive). The issue is the disproportionate royalty structure that is well over the revenue generated for even the largest and most profitable internet radio sites.

Sites like Digitally Imported (di.fm) and Pandora (pandora.com) could not even begin to cover the fees that they would incur based on the new royalty rates. For an explanation and examples of how the royalties will work, check out the FAQ at SaveTheStreams.org.

What you can do…

Sign the online petition.

Send a message to your representatives in Congress.

Get PSAs and Banners, Spread the word!

Support your favorite internet radio site. (check out our Digitally Imported sidebar widget for WordPress)

TechCrunch has a pretty good round up of social music sites and services (more than just internet radio). If you like music or like discovering music, you should definitely check out the post. While it’s a good write up, it’s difficult to cover everything so don’t skip the comments. TechCrunch readers have contributed more music sites and services and you don’t want to miss those.

While not a social music site or service, don’t forget we have our own little WordPress sidebar widget for di.fm/sky.fm. The sidebar widget allows you to configure the widget to either display a specific di.fm or sky.fm channel or randomly rotate through the available channels.

We had some free time during lunch so we decided to whip up a quick feature for the Digitally Imported Widget. Version 3 is ready for download and includes the new “Randomize” feature. When selected, it will override the normal channel selection and randomly display a channel on each page load. Previously you could only select one channel to display at a time. This will give you and your visitors a way to explore all that DI has to offer and experience new music. The channel list was also updated. 4 new channels were added for a total of 31 DI and Sky Channels. On the list of things to do, add the ability to select a list of channels that will be used to randomize on. See the DI Widget page for details and the download.