I know their are a lot of companies really in jeopardy of being financially destroyed by the decisions of the copyright royalty board. While I do not agree at all with the rate increase, and spoke out about it at length last night on my show. Feedback I am getting seems to indicate that a lot of Podcasters are looking at the decision as an opportunity to pick up significant listenership as a huge number of webcasters are forced out of business.
In the past 72 hours I have received over a 100 email’s from podcasters asking me to weigh in on this. While I am sure that the webcasting rate decision is going to be contested heavily, I would expect to see some significant fall out here very shortly in webcasting sites simply shutting down.
Those listeners are going to be on the hunt for content. The question that has to be asked is how do we convert that masses of people that will no longer be able to listen to webcasts. I have some ideas on that but first I need to see what the real impact will be. I imagine a lot of site quickly going to a pay model as this is the only way many of those sites will be able to survive.