Forget those bygone days of yesterday (literally), during which passionate, independent webcasters sifted through the thousands upon thousands of musical releases to select those tracks most deserving of your undivided listening attention.

Forget those fancy software bots that took your suggestions, and based upon your own passions delivered radio streams tuned just right for your ears.

Forget a world in which hundreds, even thousands of stations competed for your attention and the right to present you, the audience, with the best listening experience around.

We crunched the numbers courtesy the recent rates for webcasting set by the CRB.  The only way for grassroots internet radio to survive is to no longer be grassroots internet radio.  We have to get with the program, update our operating system, read the writing on the wall, go corporate and do radio the way radio has been done for decades.

Whoever pays the most, gets played the most.

We will charge, for each track streamed to a listener, whatever is the CRB-established royalty rate (with all those extra bonus payments for “ephemeral” copies), plus calculated royalties owed to those other performance rights organization, plus the technical cost-per-stream, plus a nifty markup for our time and energy.  The VCs love the business model.  What scale.  As costs go up, revenues automatically go up.  Pure capitalist happy and joy.

We have to thank the judges.  By setting rates at higher per-track, per performance levels, the CRB has left the small commercial webcaster with few options other than converting to a one-trick, payola painted pony.  In fact, the judges did all the tough math for us by establishing, in law, the market minimum for payola in internet radio.  We know exactly what to charge as a minimum pay-to-play fee. Each stream to each listener is worth at least as much as the guaranteed royalties generated.

But isn’t accepting money in exchange for adding music to a radio playlist called payola, you ask?  Isn’t it illegal?

Sure its illegal, for traditional broadcasters who throw music around the licensed, public airwaves. But the internet is the information highway, the open road, the wild west, the road less travelled, even the road to nowhere.  Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. No payola rules need apply.  So if you wanna get some play, you’re gonna have to pay.

Stay tuned.

Webcasting just got a whole lot greener.