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Thursday, January 7, 2016

Is Birch Street Radio one station or two?

Things have been a little confusing here at the "world famous Birch Street Studios" since New Year's Eve, when we learned that Live365, our webcasting platform for the past three years, is in the midst of a crisis.

It all has to do with the Copyright Royalty Board's new rules about royalty payments for playing music on the web. There's a good explanation of the problem at DIYMedia.net

Perhaps prompted by the new royalty rules, some of Live365's financial backers have bailed out, leaving it scrambling for new funding sources. We thought our station might disappear on New Year's Day - but so far, it's still running, and there's no clear picture of what the future will hold.

Meantime, over New Year's weekend, we scrambled to launch a new version of Birch Street Radio on Radionomy, which is based in Belgium. Considering that it's only been running for a week, we're pretty happy with the way our Radionomy station sounds -- but we're still working on improvements, to get it just to our liking.

For the time being, then, there are two versions of Birch Street Radio - "Original BSR" on Live365 and "New BSR" on Radionomy. They are running separate playlists, but based on the same library of Marvelous Music by bands and singer-songwriters from the 1960s to 2016.

The Live365 station is usually broadcasting "live" from our headquarters, with no commercial interruptions. At present, we're not able to do that on Radionomy, but we put up a fresh program every morning. Radionomy requires two 2-minute breaks per hour when it can insert commercials - but generally those two minutes are just filled with short songs, so you may not even notice!

Will we keep running two stations? We don't know! If you enjoy our Marvelous Mixture of Music, we hope you'll tune in to either or both -- and if one station goes away, you'll follow us to the other... or to whatever new home we might find down the road.

For updates on our station - and where to find it - check this blog ... or our Twitter feed ... or our Facebook page

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