Web broadcasters hit back

Pirate radio is back and this time it's on the Internet. The golden years of offshore broadcasters, such as Radio Caroline, may be gone but the Web has seen a resurgence in rogue DJs, despite the best efforts of the music industry to stop them.

Following pressure from record companies, last month the US government outlined the fees Internet broadcasters must pay for the rights to play music over the Web: small operators will have to pay about £5 per listener per month. For a site with an audience of 3,000 listeners a day, such as dance station Digitally Imported, these fees add up to a staggering amount. The widelycriticised charging system led to stations, including Tag's Trance Trip and SomaFM, going offline just days after it was announced.

But they could soon be back online thanks to the efforts of a British man, Iain McLeod. The 39-year-old game designer has developed a new software program, Streamer, which lets people create online radio stations that are very difficult to trace.

Streamer works in a similar way to Gnutella and other peer-to-peer file-swapping services by not relying on a central hub. Instead, it broadcasts a signal by relaying a stream of music from listener to listener, creating a complicated chain which hides the source. McLeod says: 'It's like a tree, with the central server as the trunk and the listeners as branches passing the signal on to each other.'

File-sharing has inspired McLeod in more ways than one. The new broadcasting fees were the final straw for him in an online music saga which has seen the record industry successfully close down digital music operations, such as Napster and Audiogalaxy, and start targeting individual file-sharers for prosecution.

Angered by the direction things are going, Mcleod plans to help the myriad Davids fight their Goliath. 'Royalty fees are fine,' he says, 'but the new rules are designed to take stations off air as the regulators know small Net broadcasters can't afford to pay.'

McLeod only made Streamer available on the Web last week. Thousands of people have since downloaded it and business offers have come his way.

Despite this enthusiastic response, industry experts aren't convinced people will switch to this type of broadcasting. They say record companies should be more concerned about file-sharing than they are about web radio.

Mark Mulligan, a music analyst at Jupiter, said: 'The music industry is failing miserably to crack down on file-sharing and, in the scale of things, it will remain their biggest threat because it is the most simple thing to do. Downloading single tracks is far easier than recording a stream which is vulnerable to a poor network connection.'