"I Want My Internet Radio"

I came of age in a time when "I Want My MTV" felt like a battle cry. In retrospect, of course, we were millions of American youngsters parroting a corporate marketing slogan designed to get local broadcasters to add the music channel to their lineup. We were kids and teens mounting the hustings on behalf a cable programming decision.

But still, there was something real and meaningful about MTV in those early years. I distinctly remember waiting, waiting for the premiere of Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video, and the chaos that ensued when advertisers and some parents got a look at the first lady of pop brandishing stigmata. "I Want My MTV" may have been pure marketing pap. But once we had a taste of media that broke new ground, we wanted more of it. We weren't about to go back.

Over the last few years, Americans have gotten a taste of Internet radio, and the last handful of weeks have proven that they don't want to go back. The innovative genius of radio content served up online is that it both serves up music that you know you like and music that you never knew existed. Take Pandora.com, one of the most popular of the Internet radio services. Pandora is driven by a technology called the Music Genome Project. What MGP does is to take a song that I like -- say, Amy Winehouse's "Rehab -- strip it down to its most fundamental music characteristics, and then play me a song that shares those traits. It might be a song by another twenty-something London rocker, or it might be a MoTown classic that shares the "Rehab" vibe.

For the users, it's an experience that can uncover some real musical gems. And for the artist, with the one-click ability to purchase the tune right through iTunes, it can be a profitable.

The Copyright Royalty Board, a little-known unit of the Library of Congress, recently boosted the fees that Internet radio services like Pandora have to pay every time they play a song. The recording industry, no great fan of technology that lets people listen to music for free, was largely pleased. But webcasters were not, and responded by declaring a "Day of Silence," a taste of what would happen should they have to close down in response to the ruling.

A funny thing happened. According to Pandora CEO Tim Westergren, more than 14 million people visited savenetradio.org on the Day of Silence. Pandora emailed everyone one of its 7 million listeners, and they in turn, reports Westergren, called Congress to say "I want my Internet radio" more than 800,000 times.

Congress took notice, and Reps. Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) began pushing for a saner alternative to the CRB ruling that would protect the existence of Internet radio. SoundExchange, the recording-industry backed group that collects digital royalty rates, began meetings with a webcaster coalition led by Pandora's Westergren. In the last days of this last week, SoundExchange and the webcasters came to two key agreements.

First, the industry side decided that it could live with a cap on the amount of per-station administrative fees Internet radio services have to remit. The way Internet radio works, one service like Pandora or or Live365 or Yahoo! Radio offers an almost endless number of "stations," and the lack of a reasonable cap on per-station fees was, Westergren told me when we talked yesterday, "basically a mistake."

And most importantly, SoundExchange and the webcasters, under Inslee and Markey's guidance, have agreed to work out some reasonable royalty rates that allow Internet radio to survive. "I'm optimistic that sanity is going to prevail," said Westergren. If sanity should somehow not win the day on Capitol Hill, Inslee, Markey, and 134 co-sponsors are prepared to push through the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007 to legislate a bit of clear thinking.

Westergren reports that he's heard the millions of calls and emails that Congress has gotten from listeners on Internet radio is being called "the grassroots campaign of the year" on Capitol Hill.

Today, July 15th was to be, in the phrasing of the webcasters, the "Day the Music Dies" -- the day that the royalty rate increase were to cause services Pandora and Live365 were to shutter their windows. But hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans decided "I Want My Internet Radio" and they didn't just wear it on a t-shirt. They let Congress know.

And on Pandora.com today, nothing has changed. And the service is suggesting that if I like Amy Winehouse's "Rehab," I might like "I've Got to Go on Without You" by Shirley Brown. And you know what? I do.