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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."
The next generation may be the one that grows up without music.
The article is FUD. Why? Because there is still demand for this service.
Sure, current generation of services might die off, but as long as there is demand there will be a way to make money off it. Just look at the radio - they found a way to keep music "streaming" and pay the bills for the past 100 years or so. It is just a matter of finding correct monetization strategy.
The musical taste of an peson set at age 14.
So just download the last 20 years of music in about half an hour you have your music for life.
I wonder how much of this is just adjustment of the market to over-saturation.
That is not to say the RIAA is not shooting itself in the foot by pushing for higher royalties then the consumer will bare, but I do wonder if the explosion in sites has lead to more then there is room for.
This is just the beginning of the end for the corporate music industry. This has been going since the Napster days, and is just jumping from format to format. There is no profit left in corporate music (Labels). The number of good music acts is increasing as the wealth that was centralized by Labels becomes decentralized. Will there still be megabands and huge starts? Of course. However, the number of quality musical artists, who are able to reach a much wider audience, will spread out the available dollars to a broader selection of talent.
The real money will be made playing music live for fans to enjoy. Here's to hoping for the death of the "boy bands" and talentless whores who take off their clothes and call it a musical act.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
pay artists??? don't the labels take a big cut of that so they only get like $0.02 a play and only after they pay off there fees?
And somehow Grooveshark manages to stay afloat. With an ad blocker installed, it offers a massive library of on-demand songs with no advertisement whatsoever. Anyone care to explain exactly how that works?
Back to downloading music for free and setting up playlists then!
Sure, I listen to streaming music. But I still prefer ownership of the soundfiles. Call me old fashioned.
Or all these services could embrace the google business model which is to supplement services paid or unpaid with heavy data mining and profiling of people. The real prize is being able to target an individual with information that has a high likely hood to cause that individual to spend more money. It really doesn't matter who or what they spend the money on. If the individual spends more as a result, then the original company that data mined and profiled the individual can monetize the entire process in their favor.
1. Give individual service for reduced cost
2. Profile individual
3. Sell or use profile
4. Profit
The only other option is to offer a service at the true non-competitive cost, which the majority of people are not willing to pay.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Because analyzing what a market is doing and what forces are shifting it is interesting to some people?
It's probably still working great for them. Pandora, Spotify, etc. are still in business.
Its doing quite nicely thank you - admittedly thanks to googles large bank balance - and its what pretty much everyone I know uses to listen to music on now. If you want to download music of course thats a different matter , but to just listen to ad-hoc music in the background while doing something else YouTube is as good as any.
They'd probably prefer to outlaw CDs and tapes and go back to the days when music was released on vinyl records which weren't easily duplicated.
Sure, if you are playing label music. There's plenty of good music out there that's not attached to the RIAA.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's working pretty damn good, actually.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
What about the effects of cell phone companies moving away from unlimited data? I never got into it just because of that.
Interestingly enough, it *is* fairly easy to duplicate vinyl using fairly basic equipment. Yes, it involves wax and metal casting, but in principle everything you need to make a few dozen copies of a vinyl LP could be sold as a $200 kit, with much cheaper refills for subsequent duplications.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Given that inordinate amount of bandwidth is already taken up by streaming video, and there's not even a single extra inordinateness left since video is more than 50% of traffic nowadays, I'd tend to say that internet radio at 128kbit/s is but a drop in a bucket. Certainly not inordinate by any stretch of imagination.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
FM radio stations all get to play music for free and in some cases they get paid to play it. Yet on the internet BMI and ASCAP turn into vampires sucking dry anything that is different.
The blame is The labels, BMI, and ASCAP. Those are the ones that deserve all your anger, ire, and hatered.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Could you please point to a generation that had no music? Cavemen had music, as far as I can determine. Which generation since has done without music?
The problem here is, that people expect to MAKE MONEY off of music.
I don't pay money for music, yet I have music. If the web just dried up, if television and radio stopped broadcasting music, I would still have music. Two of my three sons have learned to play guitars. I used to play the trumpet, I could relearn all that I've forgotten.
Grow up without music? Come on, just try to get in touch with reality.
Big deal, the big corporate honchos may find that they can no longer make mega-bucks from music. It's not like they actually CONTRIBUTE any thing to music. They are frigging parasites. Let them die off. Just starve them. The world won't miss them.
We will still have no-name kids playing music because they love music. And, if they are actually any good at it, people will reward them for playing. People will still be entertained.
Grow up without music. Preposterous.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Poptron!
http://sfstream1.somafm.com:2204/
It's free, but I donate $4.20/mo because 420.
I don't know if Magnatune is financially viable, but I appreciate their business model. They used to actually sell albums, now they just do a monthly service thing but you can download/listen to as much as you want, as I recall? And they don't try to own your files once you download them, etc. And, from what I recall, artists get 50%, Magnatune gets 50%.
It seems fair, and there are a lot of decent artists, especially if you are into world or folk music. Lots of good classical stuff, too (smaller ensembles, not really big orchestra types).
Let user post stolen content, pay nothing for it. Shift burden to owners to ask you to take things down.
Feel better for the rant ... keep taking your meds !
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
My business, (as with millions of businesses), exceeds the square footage that's allowed for legally playing a radio. As a result, I pay DMX/Pandora for the privilege. The service sucks. I either need to download an app or load Flash onto my computer to administer the account and the music choice. The rotation is repetitive. It takes between 20 and 45 minutes for the genre or channel to change. The remote control doesn't work properly. The stream inexplicably stops often. Customer service is abysmal. iTunes Radio can't be used in commercial settings. Same with Spotify. And Rhapsody. When one's business practices consist of poor user experience, poor customer support, and poor product delivery one's business deserves to die. This isn't a result of a shit market, it's the result of shit products.
My evil scheme is working! -- NPR listener
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
back when two-track was all you had, you recorded what you had on hand for talent, and bounced the two tracks onto one on another recorder. if you needed to add more later, repeat. the whole tape layer was used, and the oversaturation of bass in particular was the original development of "fat bass." it got easy when four-track head stacks were developed.
oh, there is something about knowing what you're doing in there someplace, too, because you had to KNOW where you wanted sounds to end up before you laid them down. no going back months later and doing another mixdown with different settings.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
As opposed to digital formats, where everything your grandmother would need to make practically infinate copies of practically infinate works can be purchased as a $200 kit at Walmart.
I think you may be correct at the duplication costs of about $4-6 per album, but it is orders of magnitue off from the fractions of a cent for digital. That cost difrence and the complications of the process are a significant barrier. Relatively, I think barlevgs statement stands.
why streaming services can't make money... the established music CARTELS that have a stranglehold on everything having to do with entertainment media. If the 'middle man' between the artists and the people providing their music to the masses (the streaming services) were to evaporate like they should we could all have music and artists that produce music could make a lot more money for their work, not to mention the streaming services would actually net a profit at the same time. As long as the blood-sucking cartels are allowed to reap the lions share of the profits no-one else is going to be able to. RIAA and the MPAA are nothing more than modern day leg breakers that have been granted pseudo-legality to propagate their monopoly. Without the established dinosaur industry giants in media we would have better music and better movies et al, and have them at a much more reasonable price.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
I have wondered if the increasing importance of the music video was in some way a collective response by the majors to keep costs high.
I'd believe that, especially given recent developments in understanding evolved handicaps and other forms of economic signaling.
How better to counter that than to popularise the music video, an extra that serves as powerful promotion and still requires a substantial amount of money to do well?
Then why not just enlist people from the demoscene to make a video for a particular piece of music?
Did no one wonder about that business-model bit in the beginning
No of course not. That's idiotic.
You can't make money or a business model without potential customers and you can't get potential customers for a product they don't know exists and don't even know what would be, and asking for money up front will just drive them away. You build underlying technology and solutions first, then figure out how to make money. If you want to do it the MBA way go invest in a radio station. The rest of us are trying to define new markets.
The article is FUD. Why? Because there is still demand for this service.
The fact that there is a demand for something doesn't mean that demand can be met economically. There is arguably a demand for moon rocks but that doesn't mean that a business can be developed within the current economic constraints that can harvest and deliver moon rocks and make a profit doing so. Maybe someday in the future but right now it isn't feasible. An extreme example maybe but it's not hard to find more terrestrial examples of the same thing. There are lots of things out there for which there is some demand but the technology, economics or regulations in practice make it impossible to form a profitable business.
Maybe streaming services will work as a business or maybe they won't. The fact that there is a demand out there is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a business to be developed that can profitably supply streaming services. The content has to be legally obtainable at a price point lower than the amount customers are willing and able to pay. So far that combination has proven to be difficult for a variety of reasons.
Humans will have music for as long as we can find something to bang on rhythmically.
Until humans get sued for banging on something rhythmically in the same way that someone else happens to already have banged on something rhythmically. See, for example, Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton.
The big problem used to be the media companies paying the radio stations to play their artists music...
Anyone know how music licensing compares to television licensing? Is it a matter of per play/acquiring monthly rights?
The main difference: TV and movie content owners are extremely selective about who they will license streaming rights to, at least for content that still has a high demand. They want the streaming platform they are affiliated with to succeed and the ones they aren't affiliated with to fail. On that note: the new head of the FCC just said he thinks it would be fine for ISPs to start charging Netflix extra, giving their own streaming solutions a competitive advantage.
There's plenty of good music out there that's not attached to the RIAA.
True but that is unfortunately not the same thing as there being good music not attached to the RIAA that people are willing or able to financially support. Just because it is out there doesn't mean people know about it or that they are willing to spend money to support it even if they do know about it.
when you pry it from my cold, dead mpd.
Good people go to bed earlier.
But these countries with sensible data plans also tend to have a smaller population.* In many cases, copyright owners charge a separate fee to license music for each territory. Even when the royalty structure doesn't have a minimum annual payment to deter small-time players, the legal costs of negotiating with a copyright owner's representative in each territory add up. I don't see how serving somewhere like Europe would necessarily scale the way it does in countries with hundreds of millions of people like USA.
* I didn't say density; I said population.
"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.
Recently, one of the biggest changes in mainstream music was that the big labels stopped signing bands and started building bands. [...] one is getting a singer who is especially chosen because he/she can follow orders, lyrics specifically chosen to appeal to a certain market segment by the MBA types, and then form a band around that.
I'm not sure what definition of "recently" you're using, but that's been common since the Monkees if not earlier.
you seriously have nothing better to do than make this awful attempt at trolling?
That's what gets me. If rappers insist on singing about bitches and hoes, why aren't there more rap songs about dog breeding and gardening?
I work for #LARGE CORPORATION# that doesn't want bandwidth eaten up by streaming. Hence, most streaming is blocked. Work is where I have the most time to listen to music.
I suspect a lot of other employed people have this situation. And since employed people are generally the target market for ads or they are the ones who pay for streaming services, that cuts down on a huge revenue source.
And like many, I hate most of the usual mainstream pap, so I find and download interesting new (and old) stuff. I'm not a hipster, I'm just old and cranky. Most lesser-known bands happily give away their music(so you'll come to their shows) or they sell CDs/MP3s cheaply. Result: NAS full of music at work for everyone in the dept.
Tempered, not timbered. I don't know what a "timbered scale" is, it sounds like an obscure 18th century sailing term.
Pandora, spotify and web streaming stations pay 5 times what a radio station does for the ability to play
This is the problem is the recording studios purposely created higher fees for web based companies while exempting existing radio stations initially. When the Riaa came down on radio stations to boost those rates too secret deals were made. Now we are seeing the unsustainable rates imposed by the riaa come to fruition.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I can't really concentrate on a task if music with singing is playing; I find myself either listening to the lyrics if they're unfamiliar or thinking about them if they are. In such a scenario, I have to switch to my Pandora (irony!) Brian Eno station.
And here I am still listening to all my shoutcast stations like I always have been. Some of the DJs don't speak English or do so with an accent. But as long as we're connected to Europe I can still stream music from them.
If the cited trend in this article is true, perhaps young listeners might learn of the majesty of Beethoven, the emotion of Tchaikovsky, the joy of Gershwin.
Ludwig van Beethoven and Piotr Tchaikovsky yes, George Gershwin no. Along with The Walt Disney Company, Gershwin's estate was one of the biggest lobbying forces behind the Copyright Term Extension of 1998, the statute that initiated what some believe to be Congress's policy of "perpetual copyright on the installment plan". Gershwin's piece Rhapsody in Blue, first published in 1924, is perhaps the oldest famous piece of instrumental music still under copyright in the United States.
Some law states the max square footage you are allowed to play a radio?
Yes, at least in Slashdot's home country. The bill was enacted as a rider to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
Given that inordinate amount of bandwidth is already taken up by streaming video
Bandwidth used by Netflix and YouTube and the like is largely over fixed lines, such as fiber and cable. Music, on the other hand, is commonly streamed through a cellular last mile, whose carriers tend to charge far more per gigabyte than a wired ISP.
Get Ready For a LEGAL Streaming Music Die-Off
Fixed it for you.
The next Pandora will just be based overseas and not pay the labels anything at all.
I think if there's one thing we've learned over the past decade its the the media industries here in the US have absolutely no problem shooting themselves in the foot... over and over and over again.
When music streaming started, they paid Riaa nothing.
When Riaa made a fuss, they agreed to pay the same as radios pay. After all, it's basically the same thing, but over the net instead of the air.
Riaa wouldn't agree to that and threw lots of lawyers at everyone.
In the end, the streamers had to pay SIGNIFICANTLY MORE than radio stations.
Most of the streamers died or quit very quickly after that.
This entire mess has been well documented. Now it looks like we get to document the last days of the few survivors of the slaughter.
Congratulations Riaa, you killed your godchildren.
Also curious: how is this "problem" not something that streaming services have as well? Streaming from music you own vs. streaming from music you "rent"... it's all streaming.
I imagine it's easier to get the rights to cache music you own than music you rent. For music you own, it's mostly just transcoding your library down to a lower bitrate.
All the music in existence will suddenly disappear when Pandora, Rhapsody, and Spotify get shut down.
" but I saw all the good bands." so says the bumper sticker. Not sure how it fits in this discussion but I just had to post it.
mfwright@batnet.com
The notion that streaming music, which requires much less bandwidth than video, is not going to ever be profitable is obviously nothing more than a fascination of the RIAA that finally a new medium of consumption doesn't require a new business model in order to capture the demand and revenue.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
http://somafm.com/
For one thing, sound recordings are derivative works of a musical work, and Britain is still life + 70 for musical works. That'd put Gershwin's works in the public domain in Britain since 2008, but how likely is it that a British-made copy of a score or a British-made phonorecord of a recording would get blocked at the U.S. border? I don't think the Kirtsaeng decision addressed the case when copyright terms differ.
I'm giving $10/month to MOG, I find it hard to believe they aren't making a profit, in fact Dr. Dre, the new owner of MOG, just, literately yesterday, sent out an email saying they were lunching a second music service, based on MOG, under the "Beats" label. I think someone is full of shit, or pushing an agenda.
Only works if you like popular music in your area. If you like something more alternative, or just from a different part of the country, local broadcast is rather inadequate.
Today we have this thing called the internet to be able to experience music unavailable locally. But it wasn't all that long ago where all you had was a few odd magazines like goldmine.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The Internet makes it so easy to offer competition in many areas that perhaps the idea of profits is dead. Mere survival and an income stream may be good enough. The "owner" may be some teen just trying to make some extra spending cash.
Table-ized A.I.
One problem that the stream-what-you-own services have is that they tend not to support low bitrates. At least Amazon MP3 doesn't. Instead of the server automatically transcoding to, say, 64 kbps Opus when streaming over a metered connection, it offers to stream the music only as high bitrate MP3. I was under the impression that more radio-like services like Pandora and Spotify supported low bitrates from day one. Another problem with stream-what-you-own services is discovery of new music: Pandora's whole reason for existence is to find music similar to what you entered.
I love the perversity of human nature and economics as regards music and paying for music.
First, people will make and listen to music whether they pay to or not, and in fact there is an inverse relationship between quality and price. You will pay much more for what is current, new, but as with all art, new is not necessary better or enduring and much of the best art that has ever been produced either doesn't generate profit for the entertainment insustry or is already in the public domain.
I am fortunate that my tastes run to the Classical music genere. I read sheet music and know music history and literature, and I find that what I like is often freely available, even though recorded performances are under copyright. The Classical literature is at most about 5% of the retail market in entertainment and good because the media corporations aren't going to devote too much resource to enforce copyright on it. So getting a CD checked out of the public library and converting it to MP3 although illegal isn't going to be low hanging fruit for enforcement. There are many fine performances that are PD and one could spend a lifetime studying them and the music being played.
So, the real utility of copyright is its enforcement and the low hanging fruit is in what has mass appeal and is profitable to produce. That is not the same as what is best, although there is no accounting for taste. I just think that there are lots of us who don't really care about what is current, popular, or the economic viability of the current media or publishing corporation. There has been much debate recently about copyright law. I think that it benefits a business that has been made obsolete by technology and I don't think that except for the greed and power of a few corporations that it benefits us much at all. Artists mostly don't benefit from it, and the flow of information, especially the paywalls of referred scientific journals, impead information availability. I would like to see a restriction of copyright to benefit only the artist and his immediate heirs, not uncreative financial institutions.
Google Music: Google Play lets you store thousands of sounds and there are mobile and web apps for this.
Subsonic: You need your own server for this, but you and your friends can all have servers and share logins.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
CDs are limited to a 90 db
CD has a ~93 dB theoretical SNR, but noise shaping pushes most of that noise above 16 kHz where the human auditory system isn't so sensitive. In practice, CDs can be mastered with 120 dB of dynamic range in those frequencies where it matters. It appears TigerPlish is referring to a 24-bit processing chain, which reduces the noise that each generation of digital signal processing adds, resulting in a cleaner 20-bit master heading into the 16-bit noise shaper. Monty explains.
Or look at it another way. Imagine a 1-bit format that uses heavy dithering to represent signals using pulse density modulation. How much dynamic range does a 1-bit signal have? If not much, why would Sony have chosen 1-bit PDM at 2.8 MHz for SACD?
LPs are limited to 60 db but oddly I have several LPs with more dynamics than their CD counterpart.
That's because level compression in LP mastering works differently from CD. LP uses RCA Victor's New Orthophonic preemphasis curve, which allows bass to go louder than treble, while CD uses no preemphasis.
But the point is, we're not talking about classical music with a 72 piece orchestra, we're talking about what's on the radio worldwide.
I listen to NPR's classical station, you insensitive clod! :p But seriously, recordings destined for pop radio are mastered with very little dynamic range because they have to be audible over a motor vehicle engine that allows very little dynamic range.
When one's business practices consist of poor user experience, poor customer support, and poor product delivery one's business deserves to die. This isn't a result of a shit market, it's the result of shit products.
Amen.
Especially when, they devote all of their talent and technology to enslaving the product and the customer.
We are confined to rigid asinine monitization or usage schemes, proprietary incompatibilities, non portability, drm, and data mining.
Another perfectly good aspect of human culture captured by a desperate greedy corporate pigfest.