As an early supporter and ongoing fan of WebJay, I’m sorry to hear that the service will close in June and curious to know why.
WebJay closing in June
Strategies for Internet citizens
Strategies for Internet citizens
As an early supporter and ongoing fan of WebJay, I’m sorry to hear that the service will close in June and curious to know why.
I’m not familiar with WebJay, but any internet radio-like service closing in June makes me think of the new SoundExchange royalty rates. They are much, much higher than the old rates and are also retroactive to January 2006. My favorite net radio site, http://somafm.com/ will owe 300% of their revenues under the new system.
http://savenetradio.org/ is the internet radio community’s effort to get the Internet Radio Equality Act passed. This law would overturn the new royalty rates and instead set them at 7.5% of revenue, the same as what satellite radio pays.
“any internet radio-like service”
WebJay isn’t, though. The purpose is (or I guess was) collaborative curation of links to music (and other stuff) that’s Creative-Commons-licensed, or otherwise understood to be free and legal.
There is a large and growing amount of that kind of stuff. I don’t think that fact is very well understood, nor the consequent fact that there’s a really interesting role to be played by curators of that stuff. It’s true that WebJay certainly wasn’t getting the kind of traction I’d hoped that it would. I hope some service, some day, will, it’s an important and noble idea.
Meanwhile, another tip of my hat to Lucas Gonze for having and implementing the idea.
yeah it sucks I was a user for Webjay…..however recently started using this new player called MXPLAY which is allowing all webjay users to import their playlists into this player….so if you guys want to save your playlist you might want to try this out….
http://blog.mxplay.com/mxplay/2007/05/webjay_users_lo.html
I would not be surprised if the RIAA has somehow managed to trap WebJay in their royalties net. The SoundExchagne rates for non-profit webcasters is a sham and the RIAA has proven to be predatory in their strive to hold on to their outdated business and distribution model.
Read the info at savenetradio.org and write to your congressman if you value online music services of any kind. Is there any doubt the RIAA will try to dip their hands into everyone’s pockets if they have even the most remote of claims? Their track record speaks for itself.
Another great option for playist import for stranded webjay users, if I may be so bold as to recommend a service I work on, is Grabb.it — an in-browser DHTML music player for online mp3s:
http://grabb.it/pages/webjay
All you’ve got to do is tell us your webjay login, and we’ll immediately import all of your playlists and give you the same tools for publishing them throughout the web, like the famous Fabricio Zuardi flash player, etc.
It is definitely a shame to see webjay go. Whatever Yahoo’s got Lucas working on, really better be worth it…