We believe that artists and musicians are more than just "content providers" in our new technology driven, corporate world, where "suits" pick and force-feed the music you hear on traditional radio.
Sounds serious, huh?
As of this past October we’ve spent 11 years bringing you a community-based audio stream and we could not have done it without you. We wanted to create a place where everyone could come together and listen, find new artists and share the music they loved and we think we succeeded in some ways and in others, maybe not.
The biggest problem we faced was the RIAA and the royalty rates that were passed a few years after we had started Zero Art Radio. We’re not going to dive into all of the issues with the RIAA and how they’ve put small broadcasters out of business as you have probably already heard this noise. Recently while talking with Chad Blinman, one of the core members of Zero Art Radio, about where we should go with Zero Art, he stated: “it feels like a battle we lost. Consumers didn’t give a fuck, politicians didn’t know what it was actually about, so the big labels just steamrolled over what could have been a fair process. Before consumers even realize what it was all about, their choices will be limited to those offered by big media.â€
This is very true. Zero Art Radio was one of the first streaming stations on the internet. In fact, there was a whole group of companies that were formed in the beginning of streaming radio over the internet that have all but died. There were hardware devices that carried Zero Art Radio as a preset. Zero Art Radio was one of the first 15 stations available on iTunes. All of these things were squelched due to the heavy handedness of the major labels and their group of lawyers at the RIAA. We were forced to take our station down during the first go-around with the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel because there was a good chance that we were going to have to pay super high royalty rates RETROACTIVE to when we first started streaming, which at that time had been almost 3 years. There was no way we were going to be able to afford that so we were forced to take the station down for nearly 6 months. This killed our listenership. We would lose thousands of simultaneous listeners over that 6 month period. As you know, without listeners, it’s hard to attract more. We then decided to only stream independent artists. We would pay our regular BMI, ASCAP and SESAC royalties and we would be good, right?! Wrong! Soon thereafter SoundExchange was created and they contacted us about streaming independent artists as well. We either had to pay SoundExchange or get permission from EVERY artist we were streaming, which as you know was very labor intensive. So we decided to pony up for the high royalty rates, again.
We continued this for the last couple of years and we’ve finally had to come to the realization that with a slowing listenership, that we would pull the plug on our endeavor in it’s current state.
What Next?
We’ve decided that we will continue Zero Art Radio. Although, it will not be like it was. What will it be, then? Well, we haven’t totally decided, but we are thinking about gathering a group of recording engineers, since everyone involved with Zero Art Radio comes from an audio engineering standpoint, and aggregating live recordings in the studio ala John Peel’s famous “Peel’s Sessionsâ€. It’s also been talked about that we may offer live video streams from the studio as they happen as well. Perhaps even a live concert or two streamed. To be honest, we aren’t quite sure yet, but we are in the process of ironing things out. If you would like to be involved in the new Zero Art, please take the time to contact us by using the contact form you find here.
Thanks again everyone for spending the last 11 years with us and here’s to many more!