SpydaRadio

Wyvern Radio, the main commercial radio station in Hereford and Worcestershire engages with listeners and the local community using a team of employees called Wyvern Street Stars who attend local community events such as county shows, village fetes and also commercial events promoting local businesses such as new store openings etc.

When attending events the Street Stars are expected to mix actively with the community in taking photos many of which then posted on the Wyvern we site under the title Were You Snapped?. Everyone has a lot of fun and Wyvern is to be commended for coming up with such a novel and interesting way of raising the profile of their station in the local area.

Following the high profile departures of Andy Gray and Richard Keys from Sky Sports after they were recorded making off air sexist comments towards a female match official, news broke today that the pair have joined the TalkSport commercial radio station to front a 3 hour program on weekdays between 10am-1pm starting from 14th February.

Whilst many have branded the move as blatent publicity seeking for the TalkSport station the pair themselves have defended their appointments. Keys is quoted on the official TalkSport site as saying “This is the start of something new and exciting for Andy and myself. We are delighted to be joining the talkSPORT family and can’t wait to get going.”

Gray is also putting a positive spin on his new job and is quoted on the official TalkSport site as saying “I can’t tell you how excited I am about joining the talkSPORT team. It’s an ideal opportunity for Richard and me to do what we do best, and that’s talk about sport.”

Back in the late 1990′s and early years of the new millenium, Internet Radio sprang up as a new broadcasting medium enabled by the rise of the new internet technology and improving bandwidths allowing enthusiasts to set up an internet radio station in their bedrooms, alongside more commercial enterprises setting up big business online music broadcasting. It was not long before the music industries legal eagles woke up to the fact that little if anything was being paid in the way of broadcasting royalties for broadcasting their clients music and the net began to tighten.

Clearly the home broadcasting enthusiasts who were not generating any commercial revenues could not afford to pay these new broadcasting royalties so pretty soon these radio stations started to close down. Additionally there was a fundamentally unfair act of US legislation passed in October 1998. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) decreed that performance royalties should be paid for internet radio broadcasts in addition to publishing royalties, whereas traditional radio broadcasters were only required to pay publishing royalties with no liability to pay performance royalties.

This caused a huge dispute but as usual, the man in the street amatuer radio broadcasters often broadcasting to very small audiences were driven out unless they were prepared to risk huge legal fines and fees. The SpydaRadio site is dedicated to the pioneering spirit of the early years of Internet Radio broadcasting before the moneymen moved in.