What are your Favourite Radios?

[Midas]

Auch! The feelz...

[Marc]

Sadly:

Dear RadioTunes Listener,

When I founded RadioTunes (formerly SKY.fm Radio), it was with the goal to bring the best curated music to other fans all around the world. That is still at the core of everything that we do here.

Our commitment to the music has also meant that we are paying royalties on the music that is streamed through RadioTunes.

In the final weeks of 2015, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) in the United States imposed new royalty rates for the years spanning 2016-2020. In the process, this move also eliminated the special royalty rates which existed for small webcasters such as RadioTunes.

Effective January, 2016, our royalty costs will therefore increase dramatically, as they will for all the other independent webcasters in the US. I am sad to say that many will likely not stay in business as advertising revenue will not be enough to pay for their costs.

In order to maintain profitability and continue to keep this great music available, RadioTunes is also making some hard decisions to limit our free streaming service, including shutting down all third-party access to our free streams through services like TuneIn, iTunes, and other radio directories. In addition, only Premium members will be allowed to access our steams on hardware players like Sonos and Squeezebox.

This is where we turn to you, our loyal listeners. I am personally inviting you to upgrade to a Premium plan to support our service.
Premium gives you commercial-free access to all of our music with higher audio quality, and the small amount it costs each month allows us to pay royalties while continuing to grow as a company.

As always, we greatly appreciate your dedication and support. With your continued support, even better things are in store for the coming year!

Sincerely,


Founder - RadioTunes
http://www.radiotunes.com/founder-letter

For this reason Megashuffle stations have ceased to broadcast
http://www.megashuffle.com/
while JuicyRemixes radio no longer streams top 40 remixes... hope to find some radio that fills the gap left.

Not to mention the measures sevices like Radionomy have been forced to apply

Following the increase of the CRB rates for the royalties in the United States and the absence of specific rates for Small Pure Play Webcasters, we are obliged to modify our streaming policy. The new pricing system multiplies by 6 the royalties that we have to pay. We have decided to continue to discuss with the right owners to explain them the fundamental differences between a service like ours and other players in the industry. We want that they understand the utility of Internet radios stations like ours that are promoting new artists or music genres.

In order to limit our audience, the stations will not be accessible on TuneIn anymore and we have also decided to not pay stations producers for their US listening hours anymore as of May 1st 2016. These are temporarily measures and we are confident that we will be able to revise it when a positive change with the US rates is applied.

Thank you for your understanding
https://board.radionomy.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=21377

[webfork]

Founder - RadioTunes
http://www.radiotunes.com/founder-letter
For this reason Megashuffle stations have ceased to broadcast
http://www.megashuffle.com/
while JuicyRemixes radio no longer streams top 40 remixes... hope to find some radio that fills the gap left.

I think ultimately the reasons behind this are that old media (what I'm going to call ClearChannel but I don't know what it's called anymore) finally caught up and started offering Internet radio services of their own (primarily the IHeartRadio service). Now that it's in place, the companies that created these see themselves as having to compete with small players, which were previously in an area old media didn't know what to do with.

What's unfortunate is that, as the price goes up suddenly, these companies can't spend time and energy differentiating themselves from other services. I suspect unless they have a very loyal following, they are likely to get dropped.

If it was about marketplace or competition, an early announcement with plenty of time for companies like theirs to prepare would have made more sense.

[nicolwh]

The Eagle forever!!!!!!!!

[Marc]

Soooo Greeeeaaaatt All Hit Remixes is back!!! My favourite station ever!! =)
http://www.megashuffle.com/

[Marc]

Another great radio in problems caused by new royalties rates.

The performance royalties that Internet radio stations like MartiniInTheMorning must pay are skyrocketing. The paperwork required to account for the songs we play and how many people are listening is complicated, expensive, and has spawned a new industry (and expense) just to comply with government regulations. MartiniInTheMorning is facing a back royalty bills and legal fees that will likely run tens of thousands of dollars just to get caught up and stay on the air, Already, SoundExchange has forced two of our streams off the air, are threatening to shut down our website and who knows what's next.

Further Info; Radio homepage.
http://martiniinthemorning.com/