This week’s internet column for PA:

American internet radio has been condemned to death.

If you’ve never taken the time to delve into the amazing world of online radio broadcasting, it’s about time you did. There are many hundreds of independent radio stations out there, most of them consisting of one person and their own unique personality.

Many are speech-only. Many deal solely with the most bizarre or the most unusual topics. Some, though, just like to play music.

And that’s got the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) very unhappy. They argue that online radio is different from bog-standard radio radio, because it provides the listener with a “perfect digital copy” of the original song. In other words, you’re getting your music without paying for it. That’s bad, say the RIAA.

Clearly no-one there has ever stopped to listen to much internet radio. Sure, technically speaking you ought to be able to get a perfect digital copy, but you rarely will in reality. Online radio stations are by no means perfect. Broadcast streams drop out mid-song, or become staggering and stuttering for no apparent reason. Sound quality can vary enormously from one moment to the next. And anyway, a lot of the amateur DJs like the sound of their own voice so much that they talk over most of every song they play.

The point being this: if you really wanted to be a music pirate and steal your music, you wouldn’t do it by recording digital radio. Instead, you’d resort to the file-sharing networks (descendants of Napster) and BitTorrent archives where all the other pirates hang out.

Nonetheless, the RIAA is determined that independent online radio stations, most of them with tiny audiences in the dozens, hundreds, or perhaps the thousands if they’re lucky, should pay a great deal of money for every song they broadcast.

Nothing wrong with that principle, you might say. But the RIAA’s idea is that online broadcasters should pay a small amount for every “performance” of every song. And they define “performance” as one person listening to one song.

The result is that a reasonably successful online station with 1000 listeners would have to pay $134,000 (about £65,000) in royalties for 2007, plus a backdated payment of nearly £50,000 for 2006. It hardly needs saying that tiny stations like this don’t have anything like that kind of money.

Defenders of American internet radio (based at Save Our Internet Radio) say that the consequences of this idea becoming law are obvious: the majority of stations will disappear overnight.

It’s not just American listeners who will suffer, of course. Internet radio is international, and the death of the American stations would be felt by users everywhere.

Listeners are fighting back. Americans can write to their Congress representatives, but there’s not much that those of us watching from abroad can do except cross our fingers and hope that this misguided ruling is abandoned. There might well be an argument in favour of independent stations paying something for the music they play, but it should be an amount based on their income, not a figure derived from multiplying the number of songs they play by the number of people who hear them.