shwango! blog

i should have mentioned this earlier… well, if you don’t know, i’ve got a little web radio station over at shwango! radio. it gets like zero traffic – mostly from myself, but a few friends listen from time to time, as well as a few lurkers who stumble upon it. it’s just for fun. then, a few weeks ago, i got a letter from SESAC, supposedly the third largest music publisher after ASCAP and BMI. the letter was addressed to me c/o shwango.com – at first i was amused by it. but then after reading through, i realized this was a license agreement they wanted me to sign – and cough up $77.00 every six months. $77.00 is the MINIMUM! – the actual calculation is something like .0077 times the average number of “page hits”. so really it would be only .0077 * 100 (i don’t get many hits!) = $0.77! i could deal with that! well, then i get an email from them as well. i’m not even sure i’ve got any songs that they publish – at least none of my searches returned results. we’ll see what happens! this could mean the death to many little stations like mine…

i’m all for supporting the artists and writers, etc., but come on! i buy cds – shwango! radio is almost entirely made of cds from my personal collection. i go to a fair amount of concerts. and i promote the artists i love via conversation, web sites (like shwango! radio and myjoy), etc. if shwango! radio generated even a decent amount of traffic, i’d have no qualms about the licensing – i understand that, but i think this is silly. of course if i did generate that much traffic, our t1 would be saturated and my boss would kill me!

there could be more bad news for us little sites. for more info check the save internet radio site.

for great music, both internet and radio broadcast, check out 97X! i’ve been a listener for many years – since like ‘85 or so!