Bid to deny Pandora an FM station reflects out-of-date music royalty system

The town of Box Elder, South Dakota, is an unlikely battleground in the ongoing clash between the music industry and streaming service Pandora.

A group representing musicians asked the Federal Communications Commission to deny Pandora a license to operate an FM radio station there because the company will not serve the “needs and interests of the residents of Box Elder.” The good folk of Box Elder — nestled between the Black Hills and the Badlands — may wonder how their airwaves became the subject of a tussle between a controversial Silicon Valley company and the Washington-based ASCAP, a group that collects copyright royalties for songwriters. But in the larger fight over the price of music in the digital age, the dispute over Box Elder’s FM station makes a weird kind of sense.