kiss online radio goodbye, courtesy the Royalty Rates Crisis
Pandora, that piece of Internet magic that you can could ‘train’ to feed you new music is allready no-longer available in South Africa. They’ve also had to cut their streaming to Canada. I see you can still log into Pandora Backstage to browse and research artists and albums, but… it is terribly mute.
Dunno if you noticed the comment by Tim Westergren - the founder of Pandora - on my previous post on this topic. (Sadest ego boost I’ve experienced in a long time). It’s hectic.
A very eloquent analogy of the issue from the DigitallyImported blog:
DI.fm: Digitally Imported Blog Archive
… imagine there was a law passed on an ice cream tax, and the tax rate depended on the number of visitors visiting your store rather than how much ice cream the store sold. So imagine the tax does not care if ice cream buyers came just to hang out and get a little bit of icecream - all ice cream stands would go out of business except those who sell wholesale mega packs to a few visitors in places like Sams Club or Costco, or Walmart if it was willing to loose money just to get you into their store.
For a pretty decent recent analysis of the politics of the situation see Webcasters’ Doom Could Remix the Future of Music at wired.com.
You can still kiss your favorite on-line radio station goodbye.
This has to change, if not one way then another. A big part of the problem is how entrenched and invested big businesses is in American politics - that’s the core of the issue. Why should the rest of the world be held hostage by the American legislative circus?
But wait…
I received an email from finetune yesterday punting their new desktop music player application - with no mention at all of the issues that has the rest of the online music industry in absolute agony. I can’t help but wonder why not. Are they just ignoring it in the hope that it will get sorted, or is it a matter of backing? Adobe have something up their sleeve? Something to do with Apollo maybe? Michael Arrington did say ‘entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform‘, but that’s probably just the conspiracy theorist in me being opportunistic.
Then again I notice the little inoceous statement ‘for example it can integrate with iTunes‘ - now if only someone would come up with a distribution model that doesn’t constitute streaming/broadcasting that allows one to explore music with the help of a bit of computational intelligence and social agregation - especially while Steve Jobs says things like “People want to own their music,“. Just what is the relationship between Apple and Adobe like these days?
Then again maybe the sollution could lie in ad-supported video downloads, I think a different set of rules apply to music used in advertising as soundtracks - just a longshot idea. We’ve got all this great video downloading and sharing technology that nobody - much to the big boys’ distress - seem to be willing to pay for. But interestingly people are willing to pay for music, not neccesarily as much as the new online streaming royaly rates would demand, but still… Could spell a whole new dimension of product emmersion, and add to that a bit of profiling, hmmm, could be interesting.