This Week I Quit Dreaming About Internet Radio

For more than twenty years, since I left London for the first time back in 2003, I’ve had “start an internet radio station” on my to-do list. The shape of that to-do list – paper or digital, app or freeform – has changed many times since then. But that item has remained, carried over from year to year. An internet radio station. Focused on jazz music. Broadcasting around the world.

Nothing else has stayed on my mind for so long and progressed so little.

This isn’t because the technical problem is too hard to solve. Several services make it easy to host music, automate playlists and announcements, and connect a music player and feed to your URL.

The problem is licensing.

The Invisible Hand

Every time you play a piece of music, you need to pay the songwriter (or composer) and publisher a fee. This is called a performance royalty. These royalties are collected by agencies that work on behalf of songwriters, composers, and publishers.

And these royalties are collected in the country where the music is listened to, not where it is broadcast from.

In traditional radio, this meant the radio station had a relationship with the royalty collection agency (or agencies) in that country. But if you are an internet radio station, then – if you want to be legal and fair – you need a relationship for every country in which you have listeners.

There is no global licence.

Live365 is a company that delivers technology to make running an online radio station easy. And they also offer a single fee that allows you to work in Canada, Mexico, the UK, and the US. But if you have listeners in Japan, or Australia, you need to pay for those licences and set them up for yourself.

Every time I think about starting an online radio station, I look at the map of this blog’s readers. I see Denmark, France and Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore, along with lots of other countries, and I wonder about potential listeners in those places.

And all those licences.

At this point, I can imagine someone saying, “Don’t worry about it.” Perhaps. It might be that a lot of small internet radio stations simply do that. Or they just license for their own country and kind of ignore the rest. I’m not sure.

To me it feels like far too big a grey hole.

Where The Real Work Hides

There is a challenge that can appear in any kind of creative project. The challenge of balancing the time spent doing the thing and the time spent building and maintaining the infrastructure that makes the thing possible. Writers often spend a huge amount of their time pitching and selling and generally explaining their work. They don’t just write. Photographers often spend only a small portion of their time with a camera in hand, making photographs.

For something that’s a side project, done for fun rather than profit, this question becomes even more acute. The radio station idea was always, for me, a hedonic adventure. Something I wanted to do because it felt good.

And everything involved in navigating the cloud of licensing doesn’t feel good.

The Emotional Clout of Quitting

So I find myself asking: what were the desires lurking behind this dream of starting an internet radio station? What feelings did I want to feel?

I’ve written a lot about quitting things. What I’ve learnt is that quitting always leaves a hole. A hole in the sense of the thing we’ve quit. But also a hole in terms of the person we were trying to become through doing that thing.

When I quit my PhD there was a hole in terms of the time and effort consumed in that work. But also a hole with regard to the status and recognition I was hoping to achieve through that process. Even with something far less meaningful, like quitting a digital app, there’s the energy that was taken up by the thing and the dream of personal transformation – being more organised or more popular, for example – that went along with it.

With the internet radio there was certainly a desire for validation. A way to display my taste and musical knowledge. But also an excuse to give time to the part of me that loves to learn and discover new things. Permission to dive into jazz magazines and new release lists. To research the back catalogues of labels like Blue Note and ECM.

There was also a desire for fun. Making technology work for us can be entertaining. Listening to good music is one of my favourite activities. Even making lists can be a fun pastime for me.

The story doesn’t really end with quitting. Giving up on a dream isn’t the final word. There’s a further journey where we find the ways to express those desires we have and feel those feelings we crave.

The internet radio station won’t happen. But music is still central to who I am. I can make playlists. I can make time to find new music. I can read about the global jazz scene. And I can talk with friends and people I meet about how wonderful music is and the tremendous joy it can bring to our lives.