Interview with GoSpeed Racer (GoSpeed Rasere)

A couple weeks ago as part of it's "Hot Bay City Nights," Bay City had it's "Miss Bay City" contest. The winner was GoSpeed Racer. GoSpeed has long been a presence in Bay City, playing music for it's events, and getting attention with her name. Recently, Deaflegacy interviewed her for the Newser. GoSpeed had a number of things to say, from how she got her name, from details on being Miss Bay City, to her recent fictional writings.

Read Deaflegacy's story in People.

KONA Radio is Back

Good news for fans of GoSpeed Racer and KONA radio. The "cleverly named" DJ recently informed the Newser that her radio stream is back in business. "We are now affiliated with SONIXCAST.com out of Canada," she told us, "They pay royalties to SOCAN which is the entity that collects and distributes royalties in Canada. The station is now free of many restrictions including not having to run ad breaks. Also, more good news. We are now listed in iTunes under the '70s Retro category."

For GoSpeed Racer, this is the best news in months. In January, facing skyrocketing "insane" royalty fees, she made a deal with Radionomy to keep broadcasting, But as she stated in the KONA blog, it "hasn’t been a fun ride to say the least" with server outages and poor communications. Finally a lawsuit by Sony resulted in Radionomy blocking it's stream to a number of countries where KONA had listeners. So GoSpeed reluctantly made the decision to close KONA as a station. But it was just days later she made a deal with Sonixcast, "They are a Canadian based company that provides streams and royalty coverage. It’s not a free service but the monthly cost are very reasonable compared to the other alternatives. We are looking forward to spending many productive years with them and keep sharing the music!"

For more information, or to just hear the tunes, check http://www.konastream.com/.

Bixyl Shuftan

GoSpeed Racer's KONA To Halt Public Broadcasting

Yesterday, the staff of the KONA radio station in Second Life and Internet radio stream announced they would no longer be continuing as they were, bringing their broadcasting to a close.

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With a sad heart we must inform you that KONA Stream will cease broadcasting publicly. Due to the unfair royalty rates imposed by the CRB we've had to leave StreamLicensing.com and shift to Radionomy. Now a lawsuit by Sony has forced Radionomy to restrict their exposure leading them to geo-block wide portions of the globe. Countries like Canada, Ukraine, Brazil, Japan and many others cannot tune in my station. The station listener level has dropped some 60% since the start of the month. I simply do not see the point of continuing operation in this environment. Once certain parties are notified I will stop the stream and delete it from Radionomy.

  Is this the end of KONA Stream? Hopefully not. While it looks bleak now there may be hope. There is some effort to get the voice of the small webcaster heard by the Copyright Review Board. A few US Senators have heard of the plight and there may be legislation forthcoming. Cross your fingers. In the meantime we will investigate other ways to share our music. There are other music services that we could operate through but we want to be sure that the station's character is not fundamentally changed by massive omissions to the playlist or burdensome ad breaks. If you want to keep informed of our status then you can continue following us here on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/KONAStream/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/KONA_Stream), or contact our virtual secretary, abba@konastream.com so we can update you directly by email.

  So why is it a big deal if small webcasters are shut down? It boils down to diversity, exposure and preservation of music. Small webcasters play a wide variety of music not commonly heard in larger media outlets. We are also a great venue for emerging artists to get heard. A lot of commercial stations simply will not play an unknown artist. Finally there is a huge back catalog of music that no longer gets played on mainstream stations. KONA Stream has a Classic Hits format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_hits) and we play a very wide a deep selection of music from those decades. The larger and more popular stations using that format have only a few thousand tracks in their playlist. We had over 15,000 tracks (Plus over a 1,000 Christmas tunes) that a true music lover would envy. All that will be lost to the general public.

  For our Second Life fans do not despair. We will still be active as DJs and be available to DJ your community events and private parties. Just let us know what your needs are and we'll fill them to the best of our ability.

Sincerely,
 The KONA Stream team

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In January, Second Life Newser talked to GoSpeed concerning the huge increase in fees for broadcasting radio streams due to regulations, which did not distinguish large and small broadcasters, KONA now having to pay more than double what it had before. While KONA cut a deal with Radionomy, which covered their fees, they had to raise their listenership by about 50% if they wanted to remain covered. KONA was just one of a number of Second Life radio stations which had to adapt to the skyrocketing fees.

Contacting GoSpeed, she explained she would be continuing as a DJ, and her performance at Bay City on May 15, four days from now, would continue as scheduled.

GoSpeed Racer, Trader Whiplash, Speak on Rising Cost of Internet Radio

Music by radio has been with us for many years. When computers and Internet came to be, it was possible to play music over streams over the web. When Second Life came to be, each sim had the ability to have a certain station as background music. But are some of these stations in danger of being silenced? At the beginning of the year, new regulations concerning the operating costs of licensed stations inside the United States went into effect. The result is for smaller radio stations there, including many licensed streams in Second Life, running them has become much more expensive.

Read the article in Extra.

GoSpeed Racer Announces End of KONA Station

GoSpeed Racer, known for DJing at special events at Bay City and other noted locations, has announced her Second Life radio station, KONA, will soon be going off the air.

KONA Stream has had a good long run in SL for almost 8 years. From our humble beginnings in late 2006 , the peak in 2010, to our slow demise in 2014 it's been a heck of a ride. We're simply not getting the amount of listeners and positive feedback needed to motivate us in continuing operations in SL. Running a station involves a fair amount of work and maintenance to keep it running smoothly. 

Our hardware and scheduling software is running fine but the performance of our servers that serve SL are lacking. Both the primary and secondary stream fail with annoying regularity and require manual attention to get them fully up and running again. My job keeps me away from my computer and remote access to my servers are blocked. 

Our listeners in SL are picky, fickle, and transient (with some exceptions of course. An outage would often lead to estate and club owners to switch to another stream. It's gets tiring asking them (begging) them to switch back.

With that being said I am most likely to switch off the two SL streams at some point this summer.* The stereo one will go before the mono one. KONA Stream will continue in one form or another online. If we were to magically getting a lot of listeners in the next few weeks I may reconsider, but it is doubtful. Second Life is contracting and fading in importance. Who knows, I could be wrong.

* GoSpeed will of course do the playlist for the Weekly Living Tree fireworks show this summer..


Talking to GoSpeed via IM, she stated she was "to be specific, withdrawing from day to day operations in SL. One of our SL streams will go dark soon. The second one may remain up, but will not be supported We'll drop the studio too." She wasn't getting out of music playing entirely, "I'll still DJ on request."

GoSpeed Racer was the DJ for a number of Second Life Newspaper events in 2007 and 2008.

*Addition*: GoSpeed would later make a statement online: http://konastream.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/scaling-back-operations/