At 04:03 PM 1/1/05 -0800, Brad Beyenhof wrote: >Last year? What's happening to the show? >Admittedly I haven't listened in a while, but I really thought it was >great quality radio. Is a budget getting pulled or something?
Hi Brad, There is no budget and never was any! This is entirely a volunteer gig. We've spent the past 10 years working with composers and their music at 20-30 hours of work for David and me each, with costs out-of-pocket. We've been able to raise money for special projects (such as our festival in 2001, and for transcription of interviews), but aside from gifts and on-site contributions and ads, there's no regular money available at all. At best we reimburse ourselves for about 50% of the cost of producing the show out of gifts, but there's no salary or honoraria. Even our festival ended with $5,000 unreimbursed on my credit cards, and the 2004 show costs are about $1,500 behind contributions. Fundraising has gone downhill every year as other causes (and sites) have better resources to raise cash. It's just the two of us who do it all -- we engineer our show (except for live concerts like today's with Elizabeth Panzer, when we hire an extra sound engineer), arrange for guests and put them up and feed them, and create and maintain the entire website (over 8,000 documents) and pay all the server costs when PSA doesn't come through with their quarterly pledge (which is about half the time). David writes the essays, I do the research on the composers, we scan and rip and upload and download and answer hundreds of visitor queries every month. The worst is that, as online audio pioneers, we've had to deal with four changes in copyright laws and royalty distribution, no grandfathering. With shows dating back to 1995, it's become just plain too much. We just received another of many cease-and-desist orders from a disgruntled composer's lawyers, so that's pretty much the last straw for us ... since we don't have any lawyers -- in case you've wondered why I've taken such an interest in copyright and intellectual property issues. :) So we'll be on the air 10 years in May, online 10 years in September -- and September 17 is our last show. We'll transcribe the interviews, archive the site, probably work on a book about it. Phew... sorry for the long response. I'll sorely miss the contact with composers, but I'm really looking forward to September and going back to my own composing! Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
