The decline of Web radio might have one positive–perhaps the start of an uproar against Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress who kept the royalty fees high enough to kill off young stations. Time for this aging T-Rex to go after 15 years.
Without doubt, Billington is among the planet’s leading haters of tech. Here is a 73-year-old man who, in the interest of job protection, let more open-minded people at LOC put up a first-class Web site–and yet at the same time has spoken against having the library digitize books for the masses. He sees e-books as anti-social and says “you don’t want to be one of those mindless futurists who sit in front of a lonely screen.” What a dino. Professional librarians can be relieved that he is a political appointee, a historian-Kremlinogist, rather than a librarian from the start. Billington is thus free to embarrass us nonlibrarians.
In today’s Washington Post, Marc Fisher briefly tells how Billington bought the recording industry’s arguments against a fair shake for Web radio. But that’s just part of the story. Billington reeks of hypocrisy. “So far,” he ranted in a speech in April 2000, “the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television’s preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing.” And yet this noble soul cold-bloodedly killed off small Web radio stations that were playing alternatives to the standard violence and sex from the entertainment giants. “The amateurs who run Web stations haven’t a prayer of making a living of it,” Fisher wrote. “Theirs is a labor of love and dreams. Even the biggest Web operations, such as classical Beethoven.com, had only five figure revenue last year, but now face six-figure royalty fees.”
Thanks, Jim. Oh well, I suppose you can think of Beethoven the same way you thought of e-books during that revealing appearance at the National Press Club. “It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen.”
