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Feuer Frei! Die Zerstörung des terrestrischen Hörfunks Medien

You know, I have heard from quite a few people, “You have a radio voice. You should be doing more radio broadcasting.” And you know, something I heard from a movie, “Just because you have a big cock, doesn’t mean you have to do porn.” And it’s true, but for more than just that reason.

Truthfully, I have a problem with the terrestrial radio broadcasting industry, that is alleviated in the Internet medium: The barrier of entry is ridiculously high to get to a somewhat narrow audience. Don’t get me wrong, that audience is also much more likely to buy your advertiser’s products and all. But I mean, come the fuck on, how the hell do kids our age get into the business and really start to produce content in a shorter period of time than the generation before us? It isn’t terrestrial radio, I’m afraid.

The other problem I have with terrestrial radio is the absolute berth of rules from the FCC and RIAA they have to follow. One of the things that pisses me off all the time is the 7-second delay they’re forced to employ to prevent cussing on the radio. Why? Why can’t little kids hear on the radio what they already hear from their parents? The left-wing child protectionist agenda and the religious right protection agendas by external entities angers me in this respect, because it is ridiculous, and we don’t belong wasting our government dollar on [en]forcing the will the parents should already be doing.

Why should we spend money to do for other kids what my dad stayed home to do for us? I don’t want my dollar to be someone else’s nanny. If you want to be parents, you god damned better be able to pony up for your own restriction devices. Like, I don’t know, having a parent staying home and actually take care of the kids. And no, don’t give me your sob stories. I seriously have absolutely no fucks to give, and the fucks I gave are on loan.

Another thing that upsets me greatly is the fact that DJs who make their money and name on being hyper-competitive in their local markets are being artificially restricted by the Publishing Companies under the RIAA. It angers me to hear on the radio, “OH FUCK YEAH I HEARD THIS AWESOME PIECE LAST WEEK But we couldn’t play it because we didn’t have the right to for another week and a half by that point because the record company wouldn’t allow us to air a finished piece of work to help them hype their material¹.”

What is wrong with this picture? Terrestrial radio does one thing magnificently: It offers a spectacular method for new artists to get exposure so that the RIAA fat-cats get their blood money, recant the old, and still make money as an advertiser service. And now the AFL-CIO is backing various measures to take that away, by forcing radio stations to pay the performers. And by the performers, I’m almost certain this would mean the RIAA, since if they paid performers directly, it would make the RIAA shit bricks, causing a second war.

Radio stations, from what I recall, already pay considerable fees to be on the air, to pay their workers, and get licensing rights to play the music on the air. And a lot of the terrestrial stations also have to deal with the anal and retarded marketing monkeys from their respective corporations. This smells to me of a further money grab attempt by not the artists but of the RIAA, much like the one of Metallica v. Napster, when it came out that really Metallica were nothing more than the puppets of their PUBLISHING COMPANY.

If you disagree with this – or any of the other dumb shit bills that YOUR representatives are voting on and getting passed through the house, may I suggest perhaps contacting your local representatives on these actions and giving them exactly your piece of mine – Good or Bad – about it?

As for me? The Internet is becoming an endangered space to produce what we want to have the connected world at large take a peek at. While these fights are going on in Terrestrial Radio, it had already started to encroach on our rights long ago, starting with the horrid monolithic oppressor bills of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) of Maryland and Virginia passed a decade or more ago. We still strive to barely hold on to our freedom as yet another piece of world-wide legislation in the form of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) encroaches to further restrict our ability to speak in languages other than our natural ones while giving the RIAA, MPAA and BSA authority to militarize their operations at the same time. And yet, we still manage to have our freedom.

And it’s here that we still can enjoy some freedom to create content as we see fit. It’s here that the barrier to entry is lower for us to really innovate or gunk up with more of the same shit to our target audience while keeping our advertisers paying us happy. Sure, there’s so many more eyes and the stream of data that we create is considerably larger, but the potential is there. What took previous generations 10 or 15 years to do, we can now get the same numbers in 5.

I love to create content. But I’ll never go into terrestrial radio. It’s not my scene. I could make it there, I could dominate the market… for a while. Until people who have no right to the money my crew and I made want their cut. And then how do we continue to produce good content if we can’t make ends meet doing it?