Washington Times reports Dr Demento is calling it quits at age 69.
If you’re under 50 – like much of radio – you may not know who he is. He finds and plays really demented music. “Weird Al” Yankovic and his parodies would be typical fare.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/30/dr-demento-leaving-radio-for-internet/
He’ll hang around the Internet after that – but it is hard to get motivated to put on shows for 5 people in a chat room. So another page in history turns.
Oh, I’m in my mid-20s and Dr. Demento was one of my favorite shows. Sadly, he was a man who embraced an idea that if a program was to be streamed on the Internet that he should get paid every time that happened. He blamed that for his lack of advertisers and forced most of the stations carrying the show to drop it because they streamed it on the Internet.
In all actuality, his steadfast insistence on distributing the show himself, with no network help in sales, distribution or advertising, likely did more to do him in than the Internet (after all, most of his stations also streamed his advertisers). Yes, freeform and novelty music isn’t as widespread as it used to be, but he had a lot of opportunities to turn around and fix the problems and never did. There remains a niche market on weekends on all sorts of stations for unusual programming such as his, but all he did was to drive them away with demands that rival an NFL contract (no streaming, rights fees, etc.).
All that I know is that charging $2.00 a pop just to stream a show (no podcast, by the way) isn’t going to last long. The show was already losing money according to him and dropping all the advertisers isn’t going to make the show any more profitable. As far as most of his fans are considered, he’s done– if he thinks he’ll get a surge in subscribers, he’s dead wrong.
What was his position on paying performance royalties to the artists?
He never was that specific about it, but I got the impression he supported it.
One of the issues SoundExchange has been finding is that obscure and/or long-dead artists are hard to find and pay royalties to the right person. Internet podcasts don’t get the over the air exemption that radio stations enjoy – so the stuff he plays could be a lot of paperwork.