Gallery

Turn on the radio

Posted on 20 Mar 2006 at 12:23

Brian Heywood looks at the potential of Internet radio for both mass and niche markets

The Web is undoubtedly the most comprehensive and accessible means for transferring information the world has ever seen. Regardless of whether you're blogging, podcasting or running an Internet radio station, your potential audience is staggering. This month, I'm going to look at how you can reach this audience without falling foul of the licencing authorities.

Ever since I went online back in 1986, I've been convinced that the Internet has the potential to let music makers and their audience get together without having to negotiate the middlemen. And it's a massive potential market, with over 60 per cent of the UK population, around 50 per cent of Europeans and over a billion people worldwide now having access to the Internet on a regular basis. This means that even a niche within this market becomes a tremendous number of people who may be interested in paying for what you produce. Of course, the downside is that the Internet is such a vast, unstructured space that it isn't easy to make yourself visible enough to gain the connections you need.

It all rather depends on what kind of musical experience you're peddling. For instance, my wedding function band (MoonDance) just has to be highly visible to the various search engines in the UK in order for me to get enquiries from people who're looking for a particular style of music for their nuptial event. At the other extreme, though, if you're a leading exponent of Andean Nose Flute music, all you need to do is register the andeannoseflute.com domain and sit back while the world beats a path to your electronic door (incidentally, that one was still available the last time I looked...). However, neither approach will work very well for less targeted types of music, either by genre or function, so you'll have to try and find places on the Web where potential listeners might congregate.

Internet Radio

As with most things on computers, the Internet tends to model itself on the objects and institutions of the real world, and the Net music scene is no exception. Most people get to hear new music over the airwaves, and so there's arisen a host of virtual radio stations that 'broadcast' into cyberspace, ranging from the BBC, which has both real-time and archive feeds of its terrestrial broadcasts, down to online services that allow you to essentially set up your own personalised radio station (a sort of radio blog).

You may think that all you need to do to set up your own station is to record a programme and then upload the audio as an MP3 file (or similar) to your website, and this is indeed fine if you're creating a 'talk only' format programme, but as soon as you include commercially released music you must license the tracks you broadcast. There are actually two separate licences required in order to broadcast a piece of copyrighted music, reflecting the interests of the two parties participating in the intellectual property of the recorded track: the writer and the record company. Obviously, the writer of a piece of music is interested in earning their rightful portion for any use of the fruits of their creativity, and if the composer has been dead for more than 70 years the writer's share goes to the arranger - at least until they've been dead for the same period. However, there's normally a second copyright involved in the particular recording of the piece, which belongs to the record company that paid for the recording (or its successor).

The first of these licences covers the rights in the musical work's composition/authorship/arrangement and is administered in the UK by the PRS (Performing Rights Society) and MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Society). Both of these societies protect the rights of the composers and publishers - the PRS for public performances, which includes the music being played on the radio, and the MCPS when the music is recorded onto a physical medium. There are a number of types of licence available for this purpose, but the one that's most commonly used, as it's the least expensive, is referred to as the LOEL (Limited On-line Exploitation Licence).