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Rates Lowered For Streamed Music In the UK
An anonymous reader tips the news that the UK's music collection society, PRS, has announced a new pricing plan it hopes may entice YouTube and Pandora back to the UK market. Pandora pulled out at the start of 2008, and YouTube began removing content from the view of UK users last March. "From 1 July 2009, firms will have to pay 0.085p for each track streamed, down from the previous rate of 0.22p. [The] head of the music streaming service We7 told BBC News he welcomed the new charges. 'It's brilliant. Not so much the rates but the realization by the PRS that things have to change in the digital world. Till now it's felt like they were not listening,' he said. ... 'They [the PRS] are getting in touch with the reality of the digital world.' [The PRS's managing director said] 'We've laid our stall out and listened to everyone who would engage with us. We've consulted with the 25 firms that represent 97% of our revenue over the past six months and have been given opinions from many others. We need to ensure the music artists are paid for their work, but we also wanted to make sure that the framework was in place to enable the digital market to grow.'"
If you're a lowly hobbyist/free internet radio station, with 100 listeners on average, playing 10 songs an hour, then each day you would stream 24000 songs, which would have costed you £52.80 before, but now costs you £20.40 - a significant saving.
If you're streaming to an average of 10,000 listeners, this turns you from having to have income (adverts, subscriptions, etc) of £5280 a day just to cover music costs, to income of £2040 a day - which is far more attainable.
If 1,000,000 people a day listen to internet radio for an average of 2 hours each, with 10 songs an hour, then the previous income for the group was £44,000 a day - not bad going, but I expect with this new pricing they hope that more streams are made, so that eventually 2m people listen for 4 hours a day to get them £68,000 a day income.
As a former user of Pandora in the UK I'm waiting for them to make a statement about this. The death of Pandora here was a real blow to me as a music lover. While the rate reduction isn't exactly mind-blowing in size I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it'll be enough for it to return to the UK without me having to resort to unreliable proxies or VPNs.
I've bought a couple of CDs of bands that I'd only discovered through Pandora in the past - I'll bet that the PRS don't factor those new sales into their bleeding heart stories about how streaming music is forcing songwriters to live in cardboard boxes. Hyperbole I know, but they took my Pandora away dammit!
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Spotify works well for me in the UK. I was sceptical until I tried it.
I have used Pandora a while back, and it was kind-of impressive, but didn't rock my world, and had many limitations.
With Spotify, you have to know what you want to listen to, but that's not so difficult really.
I'm assuming Spotify has direct licensing deals with the labels and shows a middle finger to the PRS!
Are they insane? Yes, they are.
These are the same people who claim that playing TV or radio in public requires a license, even when there is no charge to view or listen, despite that section 72 of the copyright, designs and patents act says otherwise. They then attempt to sue police stations among others for breaking their fictitious interpretation of the law.