The Talking Heads were right. Our worst fears have come true.

I disagree. I predict the effect will be the opposite of the widely anticipated demise of small scale internet radio. Why did motown become big? Because the big music distributors insisted that over-the-air radio pay high royalties - motown moved into the void with a better licensing deal. No doubt that will happen here. There is a great demand for the small scale internet radio - lots of artists - some of them surely quite good; and others with specialized audiences - are eager to fill the void. So I predict a lot of successful small internet radio stations that play a few big hits and pay the big royalties, plus a lot of good songs by unrecognized groups who don't ask for royalties. The loser: the dinosaurs who forced the high royalties as they become increasingly irrelevant.

There is a problem if royalties are compulsory, i.e. even if the musician tries to make their music royalty-free, sometimes collection societies and licensing legislation can decide that this perversion should not be recognised.

No sane musician would ever willingly allow their music to be played over the air without compensation, ipso facto no music may be played over the air without payment of royalties (except antique music over a century old).

This means we can look forward to pirate (aka p2p) radio stations all over again.

In any case, web radio will soon evolve into legitimate 'playlist webcasters' - the actual music comes from the evil pirate, the choice of music comes from the webradio DJ.

Life is not so grim I believe. Don't know about that particular quote - but obviously lots a very sane musicians have allowed their music to be played over the air without compensation. Compulsory licensing sets a price ceiling not a price floor, the collection societies and licensing board cannot prevent the artist from negotiating a lower price. And it is easy enough, for example, to release music under an appropriate creative commons license. I'd check which one, but their server is down :-(

My italic wasn't indicating a quote, but 'tongue-in-cheek'. ;-)

I deliberately avoided using the term 'compulsory licensing'. However, I wouldn't put it past legislators to force musicians to become members of collection societies, especially a European quango to replace them all.

EU Parliament: Competition Yes, But No ‘Big Bang' For Collective Rights

Licensing ain't that easy you know...

See: eugenia.blogsome.com/2006/09/03/

And don't forget the music that has belonged to the people since before copyright was invented... www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/folkmusic.html

Looks like Eugenia has some good suggestions for Creative Commons. Hope they are listening. Seems like there is a potential profit opportunity here too for someone to step in and do the groundwork for collecting payments and so forth.

I have my doubts that this is correct - but see this posting on Kos claiming that the RIAA claims the right to collect royalties regardless of the copyright holders preferences. I'm skeptical that they can legally claim royalties, for example, for performances that are in the public domain - but nowadays, who knows.

Yes, as I was trying to suggest in my first comment, this is the way things are going - if they haven't gone this way already.

Given Creative's Commons championing of the copyright wielding, self-publishing author, I would have thought they'd be interested in asserting the author's supposed privilege to determine whether or not their work may be freely broadcast (without a broadcaster having to pay royalties and then seek refund later).

It would be interesting to see each independent musician provide their own music streamed from their own website, and then web radio DJs could simply direct each listener's web radio client to each site in turn. It would be interesting to have independent musicians prosecuted for being pirate web radio stations of their own work. You must pay 'collection society X' who will then pay you your royalty, minus admin fee.

There will be a lot of David's against these Goliaths.