Today is the day when most of Internet’s radio station go silent. If you’re an avid net radio listener like me, you already noticed, because your station either died mid-program or got interrupted by a message saying, basically, the RIAA is killing us.

Instead of a flat fee, Internet radios (even non-commercial ones, which is most of them) will have to pay a price per performance per listener, at a rate that will, simply put, force many of them to close down. Now the hour when this will start being enforced - July 15 - is drawing near, and the broadcasters are trying to draw attention to the fact that they simply cannot pay these new rates.

In an interview I’m listening to right now, one broadcaster (Accuradio) gives a practical example of what’s happening. He has a small webcast operation, and he manages to earn about $4000 yearly in advertising. He was paying around 12% of his revenue to the RIAA. With the new rates, since he has to pay a fee per song per listener, he’ll have to pay around $6000 to the RIAA, which is more than his total revenue. So, he either needs to push to triple his advertising revenue to make even, or he has to go bankrupt.

Similar sentiments, albeit on a larger scale, come from Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora. With the new rates, they need to invest very heavily into changing their advertising models (they’re not profitable at the moment even under the old rates), and if they’re lucky, they might start being profitable in a year or two. He also mentions that the satellite radio and terrestrial radio don’t pay this rate, which means that Internet radio is getting the worst deal.

Let me add a personal sentiment here. My guess is that because this is the Internet, head honchos at RIAA and others who are making this decision think that it’s some sort of a downloading/piracy haven, where kids save the entire daily streams and repackage and distribute them, or something similar. Well, it does not happen. Although I personally have the technical knowledge to save any audio stream to my hard disk, actually doing that is the last thing on my mind. I - and everyone else - tune into net radio just like terrestrial radio: I turn it on and I listen to it. There’s not a trace of piracy here; those who want to pirate music want entire albums, not a nondescript stream of arbitrarily chosen music.

I can easily imagine a situation where people who are making these decision are scared of the Internet - just like they’re scared of everything they don’t know anything about - and that’s why they’re trying to prevent a ‘problem’ that doesn’t even exist. And, by doing that, they’re ruining an entire small industry, and pissing off millions of listeners worldwide.

What can you do? Go join the fight at SaveNetRadio.