As pointed out in TechCrunch today this coming Sunday is an important day and not just because it is a supposed day of rest. Nope .. Sunday is the day that the new fee structure for internet music stations and other music related sites comes into effect. That may not seem all that to important unless you’ve been following the story - then you’ll understand how on Sunday a vast majority of these music sites will have to shutdown or go bankrupt.

If you haven’t been following the story it boils down to this. The major music companies and labels have lobbied the Copyright Review Board for a new fee structure that charges per song played and per listener of those songs. then to top it all off the fees are being backdated to January 2006. Well they got their wish and even though the affected music sites have done what they can right up to the courts they have lost and face having to pay enormous amounts of money that even terrestrial radio station don’t have to pay.

 As Brad Linder said in a post on Download Squad:

In other words, there’s a very good chance that sites like Pandora, Last.fm, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast and others could go off the air next week until some sort of an agreement is reached with the music industry.

Now what I am going to say probably convince you I am a nutcase; which is okay to, but hear me out first. Part of me wants to have this happen because I believe that the backlash against the major companies involved in this rip-off will be massive and it should be. These corporations need a very serious wake up call telling them that we are fed up with their tactics and greed and their attitude that all music listeners are nothing but a bunch of thieves.

As each internet radio station goes quiet, as each music site closes up because of this new fee structure that only benefits big media people are going to get madder and madder as they should. If big media complained before about music piracy they ain’t seen nothing yet.

After Sunday there could very well be a tsunami headed big media’s way and it’s one that will leave them flattened.

Conversation Tags: Internet radio, Copyright Review Board, Big Media, TechCrunch, Download Squad