******HELP KEEP ORIGINAL HOT 97.COM ON THE AIR!!!*******
New Digital Music Rights Fees Will Force Many Internet Stations Off The Air!
The Copyright Royalty Board has just upheld increases in the music rights fees that internet broadcasters must pay that will make the cost of continuing to operate these stations impossible for most of us. It will put many internet stations out of business! We pay ALL the costs for streaming and music rights and it gets more expensive with every additional listener and as you listen longer! If you enjoy all the music on Original HOT 97.com, most of which is almost impossible to find on FM radio, please sign up as a LIVE365 VIP. All you have to do is *click on the banner above. It costs a few bucks a month but it helps to lower the fees we have to pay every month to the RIAA and Sound Exchange. We’re not makin’ a dime on this, it just makes it less expensive to run. When VIP’s listen, we don’t get charged for their usage.
If you REALLY want to get involved, write to you representatives in Washington and let them know how the loss of these unique internet radio stations will affect you! Spread the word around to your friends and encourage them to do the same. We’re the only ones that can save this great medium! Thanks for listening to ORIGINAL HOT 97.COM. We hope you enjoy it and you’ll help to support YOUR music.
If you want to read more about this, click on the following link.
WEBCAST ROYALTIES
August 16, 1986 6pm
“From the top of the World Trade Center…103.5 WQHT New York…Hot 103.5”
That’s how it began as Hot 103 hit the air in the summer of 1986 and brought dance music back to the radio in New York, playing a unique mix of up-tempo Top 40, dance hits and club music.
The station signed on as “Hot 103.5” but soon dropped the “point 5” from it’s name and continued as “Hot 103” until the fall of 1988 when the parent company, Emmis Broadcasting, purchased the radio stations owned by NBC. WQHT swapped frequencies with WYNY, which was at 97.1, and became Hot 97.
Hot featured extended remixes of already familiar hits, new dance and club records and even created its’ own exclusive “Hot Mix” versions of many popular songs. The station broke countless dance and pop artists like TKA, Debbie Gibson, Stevie B, Paula Abdul, The Cover Girls, Expos, Taylor Dayne, Seduction, Samantha Fox, Crystal Waters and C & C Music Factory. In the early 1990’s Robert Cliviles and David Cole, the “C & C” of C & C Music Factory, produced and hosted an exclusive weekly mix show for Hot 97.
Hot 97 pioneered live broadcasts from the biggest night clubs in the tri-state area. Every weekend, the station would literally plug directly into the DJ’s mixer at the club and with Glen Friscia, Scott Blackwell, Mojo, Roman Ricardo and Franco Iemello at the turntables, “The Original Saturday Night Dance Party” would bring The Palladium, 4-D, The Copacobana, Foxes, Emerald City, The Tunnel, Chicago, Limelight, Metro 700, Joey’s, 1018, Zachary’s, The L.I. Exchange, and The Roxy right into New York, Connecticut and New Jersey living rooms, cars and boom boxes. Every summer the station hit the beaches, with a satellite uplink truck in tow, to broadcast from Marakesh and C.P.I. in the Hamptons or Temptations and Joey’s Surf Club at the Jersey Shore. At one point Hot was wired into almost two dozen different clubs. “The Saturday Night Dance Party” even went international for two years when the station flew hundreds of listeners to England for live broadcasts from The Hippodrome and Ministry of Sound nightclubs in London.
Annual “Hot Night” parties became the most sought after tickets in town. The tickets were never sold (except by the occasional scalper!) so only Hot 97 listeners got in—and still people would line up around the block at The Palladium just to try. For five years the Hot Night parties moved to more exotic locales as planeloads of Hot 97 fans were treated to a four day vacations, exclusive parties and private concerts on the beach in the Bahamas, Cancn and Jamaica starring artists like Expos, Marky Mark, Color Me Badd, Bell Biv Devoe, Debbie Gibson and countless others.
Hot 97 quickly became one of the top radio stations in New York in the late 1980s, eventually beating Top 40 rivals Z100 and WPLJ in the ratings. Along the way, New York radio responded by adding more and more of the dance hits and artists that Hot 97 broke in the market to their play lists.
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