Yahoo! Music goes radio silent
Apologies to anyone who was hoping to listen to free LAUNCHcast today. We're shutting down the Internet's #1 radio service for the day to draw attention to the outrageous rates recently set by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff to a fight that has been building since spring: the Copyright Royalty Board rejected a stay of the new royalty rates back in April, and the royalty structure for webcasting has been under scrutiny since May. A day-of-silence protest planned for June 26 leaked last week, and today Yahoo pulled the plug on LAUNCHcast — which it calls the Internet's #1 radio service — as the most visible name in the coordinated blackout.
The pickup is unusually broad for an industry protest: the BBC, TechCrunch, WebProNews and others all covered the shutdown on the day, meaning Yahoo's outage doubled as a mainstream-media event rather than an insider squabble over royalty math.
First-order effects
- LAUNCHcast listeners get no free streaming today, and Yahoo trades a day of service availability for a public statement branding the CRB's newly set rates 'outrageous'.
- Every participating webcaster gives up one day of audience and ad inventory to put the fee hike's size in front of listeners who would never read a royalty filing.
Second-order effects
- SoundExchange and the labels now face pressure from their own audience base, since the protest reframes the rates as a listener-facing loss of free radio rather than a licensing dispute.
- Webcasters that kept streaming — TechCrunch singled out Last.fm as sitting the protest out — get a one-day differentiation window to capture displaced listeners.
Third-order effects
- If blackout-as-lobbying becomes the template, the CRB's rate-setting process invites Congressional intervention, and web radio's economics shift from board-set statutory rates toward individually negotiated licenses weighted toward large players like Yahoo.
The trend: Internet radio is converting regulatory rate disputes into consumer-visible protests, using service blackouts as leverage over the Copyright Royalty Board.