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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.
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!
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
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.
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...
What about the effects of cell phone companies moving away from unlimited data? I never got into it just because of that.
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
Let user post stolen content, pay nothing for it. Shift burden to owners to ask you to take things down.
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.
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?
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
A FM radio station only plays one song at a time.
A streaming service streams thousands of song simultaneously.
Streaming services should absolutely have pay more than FM radio.
It's still one song per listener, so I don't buy that argument.
I am the same way! But only for left-brain stuff. If I'm trying to code, I can't listen to music with words, because it's super distracting. But if I'm, say, focusing on something right-brain like drawing a picture or coloring in a book, then the words aren't distracting at all. The exception in the left-brain case is if I'm listening to an album I've already heard a zillion times — then my mind doesn't divert attention away to listen to the lyrics because it already has figured them out.