Bop City - Internet Radio's
Jazz Center of the World

Imagine that you are back in the era when jazz was expanding beyond its perceived boundaries - when jazz was an American phenomenon.

Imagine that there is a radio station spinning records on the cutting edge of jazz, giving a nod to the origins of jazz and even sneaking in some blues now and then. Bop City is that radio station.

Why Bop City?

We love classic jazz and we enjoy sharing it with other jazz lovers.

With more and more radio stations dropping classic jazz from their formats, we decided to do something about it by creating Bop City, Vintage Jazz Internet Radio. We present a selection of album oriented jazz that is not easily found and rarely heard on the radio.

Within our playlist, we include entire albums of artists rather than only select cuts. We feel that this gives the listener a better variety of an artists' body of work and results in a playlist with a vibe that ebbs and flows from within. This concept allows our listeners to delve deeper into the world of jazz.

Bop City is Live365's best alternative for classic jazz!

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Bop City Going Off of the Internet Radio Airwaves!

We are very unhappy to announce that Bop City will be going off the air very soon.  There is really nothing that can be done to save our broadcast.  With the amount of listening hours that we have, the new licensing and royalty rates makes it impossible to fund out of pocket, and advertising is not possible since we have such a scattered and diverse audience all over the world.

Thanks to the US Federal government's Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), Bop City and thousands of other internet radio stations are being closed down.  The CRB did not renew the small commercial webcasters license.  They ruled in favor of big business, ie, Spotify and Pandora.

What this means is that independent internet radio stations that served the artist and their music are gone.  No longer will less popular genres have advocates keeping the music alive.  And, no longer will music lovers be curating playlists, the corporate bean counters have taken over.

Bop City is incredibly popular.  In just the last thirty days, over seventy countries and seventy seven different metropolitan areas in the USA listened.  In the Ukraine, a teacher contacted us and let us know that he used our station as a part of his curriculum when teaching students about jazz.  Our playlist was exactly what he needed in teaching his students about jazz from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.

About our playlist, one could listen to Bop City for eleven straight days, twenty four hours a day, and never hear the same cut.  And, we were ready to add the Vogue Jazz LP catalog to the playlist...

It was a good run, for almost a decade.  We are not sure when our stream will be taken down, but we will ride it out to the very end.

Happy Trails!  Do your part to KEEP JAZZ ALIVE!

Our broadcast, while it lasts, can be listened to HERE.

Here is the letter from Live365 informing their broadcasters of the end of broadcasting:

Dear Live365 Broadcaster,

For 17 years, Live365 has offered small webcasters the opportunity to stream music and talk programming, providing an alternative distribution channel for diverse, quality content on the Internet in a legally responsible way.

Recently, the Copyright Royalty Board, the governing entity for establishing the sound recording royalty rates that are paid to copyright holders, has published the new rates for 2016-20. The previous provisions for small webcasters to opt for a percentage of revenue model were not renewed. The current provisions end at the end of 2015.

The absence of this license will make legally streaming copyrighted musical content prohibitively expensive for many small to mid-sized Internet broadcasters. Live365 relies on this license for many of their broadcast partners and, as such, has hard decisions to make regarding their future in the streaming industry.

Two weeks ago, Live365 faced an additional blow, losing the support of its investors who have helped the company with its mission for over a decade. The company was forced to significantly reduce staff and is now actively looking for partners to help continue the service into 2016.

At this time, Live365 is planning to keep their stations active while getting the word out about this investment opportunity. With nearly two decades of Internet streaming experience and thousands of paying customers, this could be an ideal situation for a company looking to diversify into streaming audio.

CEO N. Mark Lam has begun initial discussions with possible business partners as the company looks to new options in the new year.

Dean Kattari, Director of Broadcasting for Live365:

"The true value of Live365 lies in it's diversity of content - it's a sanctuary where you can hear music and other content that it so unlike the template broadcasting that is heard on most terrestrial radio. These stations are the hard work of real human beings who use Live365 to share their vision with the world. It's a home for musical discovery because many of these stations play emerging artists that terrestrial stations are reluctant to take a chance on. It would be a great loss for this to all go away."

We thank you for being part of the Live365 family and hope for the best in 2016.

Rock on,

The Last of the Live365ers
No comments: