Since Live365 closed its doors, we switched over to Radionomy, which offers streaming services and
pays royalties much the same way that Live365 operated. Located in Belgium, this service seemed to be what we needed here at Vinyl Voyage, as paying for royalties ourselves would be too cost prohibitive.
For the last 23 days, we have been doing quite well, actually. We've had listeners all over the world and have boosted our average daily listening hours to just around 100--something we never achieved with Live365. Not bad for three weeks. Commercials, inserted by Radionomy, have been regularly playing twice every hour. Things seemed good.
Too good, it appears.
Today, all of the Radionomy servers went down worldwide. Technical problems or something more?
It just so happens that Radionomy was
sued today by Sony Music and other labels for copyright infringement. According to the lawsuit, Radionomy has not been paying the necessary royalties.
No word from Radionomy, however. So all of us who stream via the Radionomy service--and there are upwards of 50,000 stations all over the world using Radionomy--now do not have a platform.
How long this will go on, we are not sure. But, after going through everything with Live365, I am not too optimistic.
If Radionomy has not been paying royalties as promised, that is a problem. But, on the other hand, getting rid of small radio stations run by hobbyists like myself has been a goal of record labels for the past few years.
And in the end, everybody loses.
