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Get Ready For a Streaming Music Die-Off
walterbyrd writes "Streaming services are ailing. Pandora, the giant of its class and the survivor at 13 years old, is waging an ugly war to pay artists and labels less in order to stay afloat. Spotify, in spite of 6 million paid users and 18 million subscribers who humor some ads in their stream, has yet to turn a profit. Rhapsody axed 15% of its workforce right as Apple's iTunes Radio hit the scene. On-demand competitor Rdio just opted for layoffs too, in order to move into a 'scalable business model.' Did no one wonder about that business-model bit in the beginning? Meanwhile, Turntable.fm, a comparatively tiny competitor with what should have been viral DNA, just pulled the plug on its virtual jam sessions this week—and it just might be the canary in the coal mine."
"viral" is a co-opted word, "DNA" is a co-opted acronym. Both are real things though which have nothing to do with computers. Either one independently is annoying, but when you combine them, it sounds even dumber, since viral DNA is a real fucking thing.
Did turnable.fm use cytomegalovirus's genome or something? Were the songs streaming from herpes in a PCR machine somehow?
It's dumb, I know, and I apologize. But don't say "viral DNA" unless you are talking about nucleotides from an actual microorganism which hijacks cells.