The congressional vote regarding royalty fees for Internet radio has been moved at the last minute to 11 a.m. EDT Saturday, according to Pandora, one of the start-ups that has been pushing for this vote in the wake of pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).
"It has to happen tomorrow," Pandora chief technology officer Tom Conrad said in an interview with CNET News on Friday night. The start-up has put up a blog post encouraging fans and users to call their congressional representatives through the night to support the cause. "The timing issue that's critical here is that many of the Internet radio providers, Pandora included, for financial reasons really need to have this issue resolved before 2009." Additionally, members of Congress will soon be on the campaign trail for their own re-elections and are already occupied by the Wall Street crisis.
To put it more bluntly, the Internet radio services could run out of money before a resolution is reached.
Earlier on Friday, it was revealed that the NAB had been lobbying members of Congress to halt legislation that would keep up talks between the Internet radio services and SoundExchange, which represents record labels and performers.
Conrad said that "it's not clear" as to what the NAB's motivations are, but speculated that it might be because the trade group feels threatened by the rise of Internet radio. "They operate the broadcast towers all over the country," he said. NAB insisted earlier on Friday that speeding up the negotiations would be rushed and unbalanced.
Pandora CEO Tim Westergren said in an August interview with The Washington Post that last year's Web radio royalty hike would consume 70 percent of Pandora's revenue and that the start-up could be close to shutting down as a result. Some allegations of "Chicken Little" melodrama ensued, but Conrad assured CNET News on Friday that the company did not regret those remarks.
"I think our message all along for the 18 months we've been negotiating this has been dramatic perhaps, but certainly not hyperbole," Conrad said. "Pandora's a venture-backed company. Without some kind of change, there's just no way for our investors to feel like it's a good investment."
A look at the Mac version of Pandora's new desktop software.
(Credit: Pandora)Streaming-music service Pandora announced on Tuesday that it is testing out a beta version of a downloadable desktop application for Windows and Mac.
Until this point, Pandora had offered only Web-based music. A desktop application has been on the start-up's to-do list for some time, the blog post explained, and was also a common request from members.
The application is built using Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, the Web-meets-desktop software that debuted in February and now powers a number of popular light applications like Twitter client Twhirl.
Pandora is ad-supported to handle the licensing fees that inevitably come from dealing with the copyrights on most music, but the company will use image-based ads for Pandora Desktop rather than the audio ads that its Web counterpart uses.
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