NOT EXACTLY TIMELY, BUT ...

As an artist I'm always sad to see any vehicle for the promotion of underground music cease. I just found out Netmusique, which I have enjoyed for the past 10 years, is gone .....

from http://hsr.telldat.net/2010/10/11/rip-netmusique-august-6-1999-october-2-2010/

RIP Netmusique – August 6, 1999 – October 2, 2010
Monday, October 11th, 2010 @ 6:32 am | News

It is with great sadness that we received this email in our inbox, signaling yet again the demise of a great house and tech-house music station: Netmusique!

We’ve been supporting and promoting Netmusique since its inception in 1999 as one of the greatest places online to listen to quality, solid, tech-house music on the web. Now, it is no more, thanks in part to the newly enacted digital broadcasting laws that are making it prohibitive and costly for any and all the small independent online radio stations that have emerged and served us tremendously since the early days of digital streaming and promotion.

What makes these laws so deathly is that the bodies that are imposing them are asking “retroactive” payments for broadcasting going back to the creation of the radio station, more then 10 years ago! Why not work with those stations and create exemptions for them to align themselves with the new laws and start paying fees going forward? This is a subject that needs to be debated and supported strongly by the community.

Below is the letter that we received from Netmusique:

Hey Everyone,

It’s with a heavy heart that I send this message out, but after 11 years of amazing service and as a netradio pioneer, we’ve been forced off the air and to go silent. On Friday, we received an engagement letter from lawyers at SoundExchange whom are attempting to collect broadcast back royalties from when we first started. We do have a valid legal argument, as we broadcast in Canada and not the US, and we also have the support of the majority of the labels and artists that we play, but the fight would be costly and we don’t even have enough money to cover the costs of our servers as it is. This has always been a hobby for us and it would take too much time and money to try to fight this. In the end, we decided to throw in the towel and kill the station off quietly. We did this yesterday at 1:46pm.

Thanks for your understanding, friendship, and years of amazing of service and beautiful music. Please keep it flowing. We’ll make sure we’ll keep it flowing soon too.

It’s been an unbelievably fun run!

Lots of love,
Hali & Jeff.