Classical music and hymns are replacing rock and pop on BBC Radio Cymru as the deadline for a rights deal with leading Welsh-language musicians passes.

The right to broadcast the songs of 331 Welsh-language musicians and music publishers rests with Eos - the Welsh word for nightingale - from today.

The BBC said Eos had rejected a substantial offer to settle the dispute shortly before Christmas. As no agreement was reached, Radio Cymru has implemented changes to its broadcasting hours and programme content.

BBC Cymru Wales said in a statement on Monday it was "very disappointed" an agreement had not been reached and confirmed Radio Cymru programmes would be affected.

"Radio Cymru's commitment to support and develop Welsh music is a longstanding one - and we have listened carefully to the concerns of Welsh-language composers and artists during this dispute," the statement said.

The musicians broke away from the Performing Rights Society (PRS) to join a new agency, claiming they were being short-changed for their work. The dispute arose from a change by the PRS in 2007 which many Welsh language artists claim cut their royalty payments by as much as 85%.

The report says artists who broadcast on BBC Radio Cymru receive 49p for every minute of airtime, collected by PRS. However, it says Radio Cymru is treated like an English local radio station, rather than a national broadcaster

The report argues that if the station was available on the UK DAB network of digital stations, artists would earn £4.71 per minute, nearly ten times as much. It said a Welsh-based royalties agency would be aiming to bring back in something more like the larger DAB royalties fees.

"Welsh language repertoire - Radio Cymru relies on that for its broadcasting," pointed out the report's joint author, Deian ap Rhisiart. "If the whole composers and publishers en block declare they are terminating their membership with the PRS, then the BBC haven't got any choice but to deal with them - that's the scenario."

When it comes to music, the classic curation role is the radio DJ—but, like so many traditional fixtures of the industry, that role has increasingly (though not universally) drifted away from creative personal curation and towards safe, commercially-dictated playlists. Music blogs and podcasts have stepped in to fill the void, and today the best barometer of what's worth listening to is online, not on the airwaves—especially for those listeners interested in discovering the most compelling acts emerging from small, independent scenes.

Perhaps no genre feels this more acutely than hip-hop, which still enjoys widespread radio play as one of the dominant pop genres of the past decade, but where even the most widely acclaimed indie acts with a decade of rock-solid releases under their belts struggle to get onto DJ playlists. Rapper/producer/indie hip-hop fixture El-P (who dropped by with a guest post earlier this year) recently took to twitter (found via egotripland) and gave a straightforward rundown of why so much of radio is broken and what DJs need to do to fix it. The self-proclaimed "rant" was in response to an New York DJ who was asked why he didn't play underground records that had a lot of audience buzz, and responded by saying "you don’t just get a slot, you earn a slot"—but even without context, El-P's points serve as a perfect summary of what it means to be a curator in the modern music landscape. You can view the full set of tweets on the egotripland post, but I've copied the sum of the text below:

if you're a radio station that doesn't break new great records because they haven't "earned their slot" you might be forgetting the point.

unless of course you are talking payola. then i get it.

not to state the obvious but that's kinda why radio is dying. the internet lets you listen to ANYTHING ANYTIME. its a simple truth.

being the gatekeepers of what people hear only works if they actually have to get by you in order to hear it, and thats just not the case.

therefore in order to be competitive with the new paradigm radio programmers need to re-examine their whole approach or what it all die.

*watch it all die, i mean.

just my 2 cents. fuck do i know.

which is not to say radio has lost its power. but to not see that on the horizon if everything remains on the same path is foolish.

personally i feel like radio dj's should have more autonomy to play what they like/not have to choose from pre approved content. might help.

it certainly would encourage the music to grow if everyone wasn't desperately trying to make jams that they think fit in with that criteria.

and that would lead to more and renewed interest in traditional radio broadcasts, which would lead to more money for everyone.

but hey i come from an era where we had cats like @StretchArmy and bobbito launching the careers of people who go platinum now. im spoiled.

look at whats happened to the newspaper industry. no one wants their news a day later anymore. theres a metaphor in there somewhere.

also there are clearly many amazing stations that do just what im talking about and breed serious listener loyalty.

it ain't like i'm speaking some sort of hidden esoteric knowledge/philosophy here. but its worth bringing up now and again.

anyone way its just the opinion of one man. #fuckdoiactuallyknow

one more thought: music is a representation of human consciousness, and like human consciousness it is expansive and varying.

it wouldn't hurt for everyone to consider their role in the purveyance of that consciousness a little closer.

put simply:ultimately the only thing that should be a deciding factor in radio play is if the dj likes your shit or not. trust who you hire.

if the people consistently dont like what he plays hes by definition a bad dj. you should fire him. but he's the music guy. let him be that.

*or she

aight "rant" officially over. WHO WANTS SOME FART JOKES!

It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. [...] That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.

Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. [...] But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.

"It's much less likely that you'll be able to make a living doing it."

"A generation has come along who don't think they should pay for music."

"I think there's something about paying for music that makes it more intense; you've got to listen harder to music. If you pay for it you're going to pay attention to the record you bought and get your money's worth."

"A mash-up is not something that you'd really want to listen to more than a few times because it's like a joke, isn't it, really?"

"And they're not adding anything. They're not adding--they're not a contribution to the future of music, I don't think."

"Anything that can take on the role that radio used to have and deliver new things to people that they're gonna like. It's gonna prosper."

Every time a radio is playing
they're saying...
"and next... you will hear us play
something with the publisher's okay."
Listening to this great announcer trilling
this thrilling...
new text!
Told me what to do
Try this very notion out on you...

The American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers is Tin Pan Alley's clearing house. Its 800 composer & publisher-members own the copyrights to nearly all the music composed in the U. S. since 1914. It is affiliated with similar societies abroad. To many radio listeners and broadcasters the phrase "by special permission of the copyright owners" has been irksome. A. S. C. A. & P. used to insist upon it, permitting no facetious trifling with the announcement. Lately, however, it lifted this requirement. Most of its songs may be performed without special permission, but a number are restricted, for example musical comedy songs which the producers do not wish to be too soon familiarized.

Tin Pan Alley is sadly aware that Radio has virtually plugged up its oldtime outlets, sheet music and gramophone discs. The average music publisher used to get $175,000 a year from disc sales. He now gets about 10% of this. No longer does a song hit sell a million copies. The copious stream of music poured out by Radio puts a song quickly to death. The average song's life has dwindled from 18 months to 90 days; composers are forced to turn out a dozen songs a year instead of the oldtime two or three.

The modern version of that is the wholesale commoditizing of music catalogs by the labels who create licensing deals with the streaming music services. Those actions in turn further homogenize the streaming music service systems as the services only have access to the same catalogs – there is no differentiation. Artists get pennies, or less than a penny, when someone streams their song, and the listener gets advertising in the stream unless they pay to escape the ads.

Music streaming on the web is not a Big Idea, it’s simply a lack of intellectual vision and thinking. Worse, it has advanced the “passive listening” experience. It’s just terrestrial radio dumped on to the web in other words – including advertising....

[....]

The bottom line is that there is no differentiation at the end of the day between Mog, Rdio, Spotify, Rhapsody, and all the others too numerous to mention, if they all have the same music catologs – widgets and tactics don’t count.

Getting a song “added” to a station’s playlist to get a certain number of plays per week involves a rather byzantine process that brings in various parties, called independent promoters (“indies”). These “indies” are first paid by the label. It’s important to note that the money the indies receive isn’t necessarily compensation paid directly to them for getting Program Directors to get a song played. Rather, they work more like an intermediary to pass the label’s money to the radio station. These indies, with the money paid to them from the labels, pay the radio station money for various listener give-aways, bumper stickers and so on. To top it off, these very same indies are often also paid a second time by the stations themselves as a consultant to advise the stations on what songs they should play.

Here’s why: You’ve come to these indies, and they’ve gone to the labels, and they’ve taken your money, and they know that you’re probably not coming back any time soon. On the other hand, the majors are coming every week with money and new artists. Who would you prioritize if you were in the indie/radio station’s shoes?

The illegal broadcasters could be fined 2,500 euros just half an hour after receiving a warning letter.

"now prohibited from forwardly announcing song titles, broadcasting more than three songs from the same album or four songs from the same artist in a three-hour period, making archived webcasts of their shows available online for longer than two weeks and making those webcasts available for download."

"In 1865, slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment. No more free labor," Conyers said. "It abolished at the same time involuntary servitude. What does that have to do with what we're here for today? Well, when you tell somebody that you're benefiting from their work product but there's no avenue for compensation, it kind of harkens back to that great problem."

"Our government's not doing anything about piracy. Until we can hear what a day of radio is like with no music, until this place sits silent because the music creators and the artists and copyright (holders) are not happy because they're not being protected like everyone else is, then, yeah, I would like that power myself. It has to be placed in the right hands, so it can't be one person, but a board that represents music, its creators and its content owners. I think that'd be more than fair to stand up and say, 'Look, you've ignored us, because there's 50,000 of us and 300 million voters. You've ignored us, and now to show you, we would like to just simply stop for a day,' and see how dry this world gets."

And for what? Imagine, as a thought experiment, that this bill were passed and, simultaneously, payola were made fully legal. Does anyone doubt that more money would flow toward the radio stations than away? Radio remains the primary means by which the music industry promotes its product. By pushing for this fee, the labels are essentially asking their advertisers to pay them for the service of selling their stuff.

Ah, you say, but what about the independent artists who don't get big promotional pushes from the major music labels? Surely they'd benefit from a new revenue stream? Actually, they'll be even worse off. The economic mission of most commercial radio stations is to deliver audiences to the sponsors whose spots are aired between tunes. So programmers have a built-in preference for music whose mass appeal has already been proven. If you increase the cost of playing a record, that just intensifies the incentive: The more you pay to play a song, the more conservative you'll be about which songs you play. The marginal cost of playing each track is the same, but the commercial payoff is greater for established artists.

Generally speaking, the more it costs to run a station, the more risk-averse it will be. That's one reason low-power and Web outlets are more experimental: They don't have as much money on the line. But those stations--the ones that go out of their way to play diverse and unfamiliar material--are precisely the ones that have the hardest time paying the song tax. The proposed law acknowledges the problem by introducing a sliding scale, with the least profitable outfits paying $500 a year. But while that may be chump change for a big broadcaster, it's a pretty big piece of the operating budget for a low-power, volunteer-run community or student station.

Nor is it the only cost the law will impose. "The record labels are completely out of touch as to how college radio stations operate," Warren Kozireski, president of College Broadcasters Inc., recently complained on his organization's website. "The extensive record keeping requirements that will be required by the Copyright Royalty Board alone will add hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to the true cost of a performance fee." It's relatively easy to do that book-keeping if you have a narrow playlist and rarely deviate from it, as is the case with most large commercial radio stations. But if you have a library of thousands of albums and 45s, many of which were never reissued on CD, and if you allow your DJs to choose which ones they play--or even to bring in still more music from their personal collections of rare soul or jazz or bluegrass or electronica obscurities--then tracking the data suddenly becomes a full-time job.

Worse yet: Though the rhetoric around the proposal focuses on the benefits to musicians, much of the money won't make it to the artists in the first place. In part that reflects the fact that the fees go not just to the performers but to the copyright owner, which frequently means the record company. But it also reflects the corruption in the industry, which legislation like this has probably abetted.