KPIG Returns Online, for a Price

Praise the lard: fans of hammy puns and progressive music outside the Santa Cruz metro area can rejoice, as KPIG has returned to the Internet airwaves.

The tiny station--which, through its pioneering use of the Internet, reached an audience far beyond its signal area--ceased streaming its signal on the Web last month, when management said it couldn’t afford new royalty fees that the U.S. Copyright Office ordered Webcasters to pay to record companies and artists.

But the station has joined a new service from online music purveyor RealNetworks and is part of a package that includes two BBC channels, National Public Radio, Seattle classical station KING and 30 to 40 noncommercial, Internet-only channels of various genres.

There is, however, a catch: Online listeners, used to getting their free-form music cost-free, will now have to pay $5.95 a month, a subscription fee that offsets the expense of the service and the royalties and ensures the stream’s continuation, said KPIG Webmaster Bill Goldsmith.

“Listeners are very excited that we’re going back online in any way, shape or form,” Goldsmith said. “Everybody I’ve heard from has been very understanding of the need to make this move. Granted, the portion of the audience we’ve been hearing from is the most loyal and the most vocal.”

While fans of stations such as KPIG and KING, both of which have consistently topped audience charts among Webcasters, may be willing to pay for their favorite streams, subscription services won’t save most radio stations trying to remain on the Internet, said Kurt Hanson, publisher of the Radio and Internet Newsletter, an online industry journal. For example, a classic-rock station in Cleveland wanting to stream on the Internet won’t get enough paying customers in Los Angeles, who can simply tune in KCBS or KLOS, he said.

“There are a few other stations that might have that marquee value,” like KPIG, Hanson said. “It’s the kind of thing you can’t get on your local AM or FM band.”

Both online and over the air, KPIG has nurtured a passionate audience, with its “free-range DJs” and an Americana format that can feature Alison Krauss and B.B. King, or Elvis Costello and Roy Rogers in the same hour. Piggies (station fans) visiting the KPIG Web site can watch DJs on the “Ham Cam,” and post “squeals” for each other on the message board.

KPIG, located in Freedom, Calif., near Santa Cruz, claims to be the first commercial FM station to Webcast and the first radio station to do it full time, when it went online in August 1995. It was beaten onto the Internet only by a couple of college stations that transmitted intermittently, said Goldsmith, who also operates his own online Web cast, at RadioParadise.com.

Dozens of Webcasters shut off their streams this summer after the royalty issue came to a head following nearly four years of dispute. Radio stations have always had to pay royalties to the authors of songs they play, but not to the performers. But an act of Congress in 1998 decreed that--unlike their broadcast-only brethren--online music services would also have to start paying artists, via their record companies.

In June, the Librarian of Congress, who oversees the U.S. Copyright Office, set the royalty rate--a price immediately criticized as too low by the recording industry and too high by Webcasters. The record companies say they’re trying to get a fair share for the artists, whose work gives the Webcasters the material they play. Meanwhile, hobbyists streaming their favorite tunes from home, Webcasters of all sizes and even well-known services such as KPIG said the cumulative cost of the royalties was too high not to bankrupt them. Facing fees running to thousands of dollars per month, Webcasters cried that 90% of them would be forced offline.

The Webcasters argue they’re helping the very artists that the record companies accuse them of robbing. Hanson noted that Webcasters, such as KPIG and those with even more esoteric niche programming, give airplay to songs and artists and genres of music that listeners might never have heard otherwise.