Hot on the heels of a Copyright Royalty Board decision that could potentially kill internet radio as we know it, a possible hail-mary save. The CRB decided earlier this year that webcasters and internet radio stations, who’ve been paying royalties on the songs they play as a percentage of revenue, should start paying strictly enforced fees per song and listener. The formula is simple but deadly: take a base rate per song (11/100ths of a cent, but potentially increasing over the next five years), multiply that by the number of songs played in an hour, multiply that by the number of listeners in an hour, and you have the cost in royalties per hour of airtime. With this revamped metric, smaller broadcasters were shocked to discover their royalty costs swallowing up their revenue and then some. No less than NPR filed an appeal, saying the vastly increased fees were capricious, but to no avail.

That’s why if you support sites like Pandora, Last.fm and the mighty NPR, and you live in the United States, you’ll want to get in touch with your representatives and ask them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would reverse the Royalty Board’s decision and return to a flat-fee-plus-revenue-percentage model. As someone who grew up listening to tons of internet radio—I owe my musical tastes to a guy in Portland named Rich and a site called indiepopradio—I know full well the impact rising costs can have on internet radio, and the power of internet radio to reach people and expose them to music, culture and opinions outside what’s available on the local dial. We lose these stations and webcasters and we might as well go back to the bad old days when Clear Channel ruled everything.