Good-bye, Yellow Brick Road

For more than four years now Emerald City Radio has been bringing you Oz music twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

But no more.

How the story of Emerald City Radio came to an end:

Live365, the internet radio website that hosts Emerald City Radio and hundreds of other internet radio stations of all varieties, is being forced to shut down at the end of January 2016.

The broadcasters that Live365 hosts are largely not radio professionals. They tend to be people who simply want to share their taste in music with the world. For awhile the internet made that possible at a reasonable cost. Each broadcaster pays a small yearly fee to Live365 for the ability to broadcast their chosen programming. Live365 in turn tracks and pays royalties for all proprietary music broadcast by the hundreds of stations they host.

At the end of 2015 provisions for small webcasting were not renewed by the US Copyright Royalty Board. These provisions had allowed small to mid-sized internet broadcasters to pay lower royalty rates. As of 2016 these rates have increased to such an extent that most of these broadcasters will find them prohibitively expensive.

As a result, Live365 will cease broadcasting at the end of January 2016. Unless an alternative presents itself, the majority of the stations that Live365 brought to the world will cease to exist.

Including Emerald City Radio.

So if you want to get your fill of the widest variety of Oz music on the internet, you have a few days remaining to tune in. It's free and easy to listen to Emerald City Radio on Live365. Just go to the Live365 website and register your account for free. Here's the link. Click the magnifiying glass on the upper right of the Live365 home page, search for Emerald City Radio (or any other genre of music you're interested in), and start listening. But hurry, you have less than a week left.

It's been an enjoyable four years collecting and broadcasting Oz music from the sublime to the ridiculous, conducting radio interviews, and figuring out how long a playlist we could fit into the space Live365 allotted to Emerald City Radio (more than fourteen hours!). If you've been a listener, thank you. We hope you've enjoyed it.

Farewell.