Internet radio for the musical middle class

When Tim Westergren created Pandora.com, he was thinking about musicians.

A musician himself, he founded a Web site that was something of a reference tool to help musicians connect with listeners. The site allowed listeners to find artists with styles similar to those they already enjoyed using the Music Genome Project, which catalogs musical attributes. Pandora became a powerful tool for discovering familiarity in the often dauntingly unknown world of underground music.

“I wanted to help artists find audiences. The Genome Project came from my experience as a film composer, which requires a lot of thought on the tastes of others. So, I got used to thinking about tastes in terms of attributes,” Westergren said.

Between Pandora’s early days as a reference tool and now, it has evolved into a full-fledged Internet radio station. Pandora remains based on the same principle ““ enter the name of an artist, and the Music Genome Project will create a radio station based around that sound. As for Westergren’s initial vision, it’s safe to say his fellow musicians appreciate the effort.

“We get e-mails from artists saying that once they started the service, they’ve noticed a spike in item sales and concert attendance,” Westergren said.

As the scope of Pandora has evolved, so has Westergren’s mission. While musicians noticed increasing interest in their work, listeners noticed entirely new realms of sound.

“One of the real benefits is that we avoid a constrained, limited playlist. We play over 40,000 artists, 95 percent of whom are played every day. Thirty-nine thousand of these artists are never played on the radio at all, so this really is a more democratic form of broadcasting,” Westergren said.

Operating on that scale, its seems difficult for terrestrial radio to keep up, at least in terms of diversity. Where the airwaves recycle content, the Internet may offer some new options.

“Radio is usually pretty repetitive, playing the same sort of stuff over and over. Sometimes I want to hear it and sometimes I don’t. Even between stations there’s a pretty narrow selection. I’ve definitely found some groups on the Internet that I wouldn’t have on radio,” said Jason Offineer, a third-year anthropology student.

As terrestrial radio, with its limited playlists, becomes more and more difficult to break into and the music industry evolves into a corporate maze, many artists are clamoring for just this sort of democracy. Just as the Internet has provided an explosion in all things communicative ““ from turning every small-time pundit into a serial blogger, to generating massive online social networks ““ it has given musicians their own grassroots way to stake a sonic claim. And this seems to be exactly what Westergren wants.

“We’re not out to break hit artists. Our philosophy is that a rising tide lifts all boats. Basically, we believe in a musical middle class,” Westergren said.

Unfortunately for these homegrown efforts at music making, things aren’t as simple as they used to be. Recent royalty rate increases ““ approved by the Copyright Review Board and targeted at Internet radio ““ threaten to pull webcasters like Pandora from cyberspace. Under the increased royalty rates, stations like Pandora would be required to pay more than 100 percent of their yearly income. And as Internet advertising is still a burgeoning field, this is a dangerous business plan.

Fortunately for webcasters ““ and partly because of their efforts ““ advocacy groups dedicated to this issue have sprung up. One of these groups,

SaveNetRadio.org, has been working to address the problem.

“We are a coalition of webcasters, artists, and listeners ““ basically people affected by the product. The coalition has come together sort of like a neighborhood group, taking advantage of existing networks. We’ve used Internet radio broadcasts to draw in listeners and get them involved,” said Jake Ward, SaveNetRadio.org’s spokesman.

Not only is Internet radio’s musical content democratic, but so is its fight for survival. Thanks to the surge of responses to the royalty rate increase, the Internet Radio Equality Act, which aims to apply sustainable royalty rates to Internet radio, is currently under debate in the House of Representatives.

“A few days after the rates were increased, we had around 400,000 listeners who had contacted their congressmen. The nature of our fight is different, since Internet radio doesn’t have much clout ““ we have to rely on the people,” Westergren said.

Westergren, still thinking about musicians, sees Internet radio as it currently stands as a legal middle ground between free illegal downloading and the prices of proposed royalty rates. That is, if webcasters like Pandora are gone, Internet radio listeners will find cyberspace cluttered with the terrestrial radio content they have been trying to escape and may resort to illegal downloading.

Ward, too, stresses the importance of supporting musicians. That, however, might be a difficult task for webcasters out of business.

“We believe artists should be compensated for their work,” said Ward.

“But 100 percent of zero is zero.”

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