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Posted on 20 Mar 2006 at 12:23

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

The second licence is issued by PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) and is calculated on a different basis from the LOEL. The LOEL is calculated on a time basis, while the PPL licence has a fixed cost of 0.0503p per track, per user, per audio stream. The main upshot of this is that you have to keep track of how much music you broadcast and to how many listeners. This applies to music administered by the two copyright organisations (and all their international equivalents), but this covers most commercially released albums and a fair chunk of the independent sector too. If all this sounds complicated, that's only because it is.

You could, of course, elect to confine yourself to broadcasting music that isn't registered via the copyright societies, but in that case you'll still need to get explicit permission to use the tracks from the composer/producers of the music. To use music without any permission at all could leave you open to a civil legal action, in which the settlement of costs is left to the discretion of the court.

RadioBritfolk

An example of an Internet radio station that I've been involved with recently that targets a particular genre is RadioBritfolk (www.radiobrit folk.co.uk). This project has been put together by a group of professional folk musicians (led by Tom Bliss of Napper and Bliss) who were dismayed by the lack of access to their music on the airwaves. There's only one regular national radio programme that covers folk music - Mike Harding's show on Radio 2 - and a handful of regional folk programmes, often tucked into the 'wee small hours' of the radio schedule. So the only way to get a channel dedicated to folk music from all of the UK and Ireland is to make one yourself.

The cost of putting together a terrestrial broadcast station in the UK - even if you could get a licence, which you couldn't - is astronomical. Unfortunately, there are no UK equivalents of the Public Service Broadcasting radio stations that you find in North America and Australia, which give independent programme makers access to the airwaves. Although RadioBritfolk is modelled on a traditional radio station in terms of its programme content and production values, there's no way to maintain 24/7 output both because of the cost of licensing the music and the massive amount of programme production that it would involve.

The production time is substantial and it isn't just the recording time - it's the creation of web content and the administration of the royalty information that takes up a lot of time. It takes me about an hour to put together a half-hour general music programme; that is, music tracks with an announcer doing short links between them. The links are recorded elsewhere, so all I have to do is compile, level, and cross-fade the material. However, the administration side takes another hour or two to collate and type in the required information. This means it takes about four to five man-hours to create each hour of output, so a 24/7 schedule would require a full-time staff of at least five people, assuming 100 per cent productivity. This clearly isn't a practical proposition for a station run on a shoestring budget or using volunteer programme makers.

The upshot of this is that the station produces only three or four new programmes every week, with an archive of past programmes available to station subscribers. One way to boost the programmes available is the Billboard playlist: these are sponsored tracks submitted by artists or their record label, and which fit in with the musical and quality-control policy of the station. The Billboard playlist is randomised, meaning that each time a listener selects this programme they'll get a different selection and running order. For licensing reasons, it isn't possible to skip or jump to tracks, which is one of the conditions of the LOEL.