The New Radio Revolution, Heather Green, Tom Lowry, and Catherine Yang, Business Week, March 3, 2005:
For all the hullabaloo it’s generating, podcasting is not even close to being a business yet… Maybe a few will come up with a way to make a living doing it. Maybe not. Regardless, a trend is afoot that could transform the $21 billion radio industry. Consider the basics: With no licenses, no frequencies, and no towers, ordinary people are busy creating audio programming for thousands of others. They’re bypassing an entire industry.
This is what they said about Internet Radio back in 1995 – then the RIAA’s lawyers wrote the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 and 90% of America’s small webcasters gave up.
I would imagine that if Podcasting takes off you’ll see the RIAA aim their legal guns at both your iPod and Podcasters.
The DMCA needs to be fixed so that emerging small business genres like Podcasting and Internet radio have a chance to develop BEFORE they are saddled with royalties and bureaucratic burdens that AM&FM have never paid, nor faced.