Testimony from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on April 26 on Parity, Platforms, and Protection: The Future of the Music Industry in the Digital Radio Revolution is available.

My heart is with songwriter Victoria Shaw:

From cable and satellite to Internet radio to download services, licensed services offer music fans the music they want in the way they want, all for prices that are appropriate to consumers and fair to those of us who create it. This is the bright future of the music industry.

But whether we are operating in the physical world or in that bright digital future, one truism remains: artists, composers, record labels, and everyone involved in making music, depend on sales to survive. In the digital world, those sales are made through download services like iTunes and Napster. The licenses required by these services to allow people to purchase our music is what will sustain us as we move further away from the physical world of tapes and CDs.

Yet, it is precisely those licenses – and those sales – that are being threatened by the new offerings of radio platforms. By allowing listeners to record broadcasts and build up entire jukeboxes of music on portable devices, radio services are becoming download services – but without paying the download license.

posted by James DeLong @ 10:01 AM | Radio

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