This months soundtrack is loaded with the usual goodness you’ve come to expect from the sOUNDTRACK tO mY lIFE. But instead of telling you about the music I’d like to take some time to tell you about what’s going on with the landscape of online music services.

Due to unfair licencing fees set earlier this year - it costs online music services almost 4 times as much as satellite radio and nothing for typical radio stations - online music services such as Pandora are on the brink of shutting down their sites. In fact the great retro music mix site Muxtape has already been forced to shut down - although not exactly from the costs of licensing. You can learn about how the RIAA created legislation which charges outrageous fees to online services while letting traiditional terrestrial radio pay just a small fraction of those same fees. In an effort to save pandora and bring online music fees inline with typical radio stations please take a bit of time to do one or more of the following.

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Network neutrality is one of the core concepts that make up the internet as we know it. The basic idea is that each packet or piece of data being transmitted over a network receives equal priority. No matter where the data comes from - be it a large corporation or individual website - and no matter what type of data - image, text, movie or voice - it’s all treated equal when traveling through the pipes that make up the internet. A level playing field throughout the internet allows my web site to load just as fast as IBM’s website. It’s what has allowed innovation to come from every corner of the world in the form of startups such as Google or Facebook. Without network neutrality large companies would gain a stranglehold on the internet - stifling new ideas and controlling everyone’s access to both view and publish information.

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