[OldDave]

When the internet became large enough many, if not most stations in the country jumped on the band wagon to stream their signals. I don't know if many ever asked themselved why. Kind of like newspapers with free websites.

No one paid much attention for a few years, but when it began to spread widely the music industry started to go bananas. These are the same people who arrest 10 year old kids for illegally downloading their music.

A station must pay rather stiff fees for the music rights to stream, even though they have already paid stiff fees to broadcast that same music. Doesn't make much sense, does it. ALSO, they are required to keep laborious records of what they play and when.

So, fairly quickly most of the music stations in the country dropped the streaming. The only stations that do it much now are the ones that offer local news and talk or local sports talk. You don't need permission to stream your own content. Also though if you do national talk on your station you have to deal with those rights.

One other fun fact for small local stations, some of those national programs you pay to air locally also stream or offer for download the very same programs they are paying for. I think there will be a change in this system in the next few years because it's out of control.

Of course the real issue is music download. Kids no longer purchase records. They may pay to download them, but then they share them with their friends. The keep coming up with high dollar technologies that prevent kids from sharing. It takes my 27 year old son, the programmer, about ten minutes to figure out a work around for the latest plan. And he's fairly honest, lol.