About Zero Art Radio
Zero Art Radio is a consortium of musicians, artists, and people in general who are enthused by creativity and free thought. We are a group of individualists embracing the idea of providing artists, musicians, and listeners a place to combine energy, minds, and music.
Zero Art’s History
The “station” continued on like this for a couple of years until Tom Pepper, Justin Frankel and Stephen ‘Tag Loomis released SHOUTcast. This made it possible for a web application to be built around the audio stream. The application that Zero Art Radio built, with the help of Rem Cmiral, was a simple front-end that provided “currently playing” information and history of what had played recently. This was quite advanced in 1999, believe it or not. The dynamic web was being built around interactive media.
During this time Zero Art Radio built a big following by providing a quality internet-based audio stream. Everything was great. This new paradigm in broadcasting created new possibilities not only for artists and musicians, but for new businesses. There were businesses starting up that provided different kinds of services and hardware for internet broadcasts. There were hardware devices that carried Zero Art Radio as a preset and when Apple released iTunes, Zero Art Radio was one of the first 15 stations available as a preset. This was soon to be squelched by heavy handed tactics by the RIAA and their lawyers.
You can read what ensued by reading here
During mid-2000 we were forced to take our station down during the first go-around with the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel because there was a good chance that we were going to have to pay very high royalty rates RETROACTIVE to when we first started streaming, which at that time had been almost 3 years. There was no way we were going to be able to afford that… so we were forced to take the station down for nearly 6 months. This killed our listenership. Period. We would lose thousands of listeners over that 6 month period. As you know, without listeners, it’s hard to attract more. At this point we then decided to only stream independent artists. We would pay our regular BMI, ASCAP and SESAC royalty fees and we would be good, right?! Wrong! Soon thereafter SoundExchange was created and they contacted us about streaming independent artists as well. We either had to pay SoundExchange or get permission from EVERY artist we were streaming, which as you know was very labor intensive. So we decided to pony up for the high royalty rates, again.
All the while we had developed a feature rich web application that provided listeners the ability to view/search the entire Zero Art Radio playlist and request songs, which were placed into the queue in real time. Listeners could talk in interactive forums and listen to a single radio stream which was “programmed” by the community. Something that we still think is seriously lacking in the digital broadcast realm. Everything has moved towards “personal streams” that are created by recommendation engines. There is little to no human interaction and it seems that artists and music that already have quite a bit of promotion behind them are pushed out in droves for these engines.
Mid-2008 – We continued this for the last couple of years and we’ve finally had to come to the realization that with a slowing listenership, that we would pull the plug on our endeavor in it’s current state.
Current – We’ve decided to keep Zero Art Radio alive. Although, it will not continue in the same manner as it has for the last decade. We will begin aggregating live recordings in the studio ala John Peel’s famous “Peel’s Sessions”. It’s also been talked about that we may offer live video streams from the studio as they happen. We will archive these videos on the site as well. We’ve also decided to put up short podcasts of new music that we think the original Zero Art Radio community would find interesting.
