Tag Archives: Pandora

Shorties

Warner Bails on Streaming Sites

14 Comments

Warner Music has decided against licensing new music to online streaming sites like Last.FM, Pandora and others. Citing his belief that these sites, which deliver his artists’ music to untold potential new fans, was not “positive” for the music industry, chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. told the BBC that Warner would not issue licenses to new sites.

“Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed,” Bronfman told the BBC. “The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price strategy’, is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

Instead, Bronfman said Warner will focus on launching their own fee-based service to compete with streaming sites and online retailers like iTunes.

“The number of potential subscribers dwarfs the number of people who are actually purchasing music on iTunes,” Bronfman said. He sees the potential for subscriptions in the “hundreds of millions if not billions of people, most of whom are not today either buyers or certainly heavy buyers of music.”

Yeah, right. Good luck with that.

Continue reading Warner Bails on Streaming Sites →

Shorties

Poll: 75% of Students Prefer Downloads to Streams

2 Comments

iPhone A recent University of Reading study finds that 75% of students polled prefer downloading music to buying hard copies or even streaming, which may speak to a sort of splitting of the difference for how younger audiences view digital music. If there was ever any debate on whether people still want to “own” music, this bit of information sheds a little bit more light.

The popularity of streaming sites like LastFM, Pandora and Spotify had a lot of nobs who think about these things wondering if we’d eventually hit a point wher nobody owns and keeps any form of music—be that physical CDs and records or digital files. The idea was that as broadband and wireless technology improved and the masses moved to smart phones we’d eventually just have all music available on demand via streaming tools. But is that what anyone wants?

According to the survey of 10,000 university students, “75 percent said they wouldn’t pay for a music-streaming service but would rather use sites such as iTunes to download and keep tracks on hard drives or MP3 players.”

The survey is cited in a press release apparently issued on behalf of TunesPro.com, a new download site hoping to compete with iTunes. Their angle seems to be to undercut on price. The press release quotes a spokesman for TunesPro:

We keep our prices low and concentrate of making money through volume sales. Currently we charge 19c per song and offer a further 10% when a whole album is purchased. We believe this will attract the younger users away from iTunes, which charge almost 6 times more than we do.

So for now it appears many younger audiences still want to possess something for their money. Will that hold as the ease and cost for bandwidth decreases and becomes more widespread? Will you still want to “hold” your music?

Links

Online Radio Royalty Deal Reached

Leave a comment

The New York Times reports that Music Labels Reach Royalty Deal With Online Stations:

Webcasters with significant advertising revenue, like Pandora or Slacker, will pay the greater of 25 percent of revenue or a fee each time a listener hears a song, starting at .08 cent for songs streamed in 2006 and increasing to .14 cent in 2015. Pandora had $19 million in revenue last year and expects that to rise to $40 million this year.

Small sites with less than $1.25 million in revenue, like AccuRadio, Digitally Imported and RadioIO, will pay 12 to 14 percent of it in royalties. All stations will be required to pay an annual minimum fee of $25,000, which they can apply to their royalty payments.

The rates are still higher than what terrestrial radio stations pay. But it looks like internet radio will survive a little longer. Who knows how long? So enjoy it while you can…

Previously: Internet Radio Is Doomed (2008).

Via Idolator.

Links, Shorties

Internet Radio Is Doomed

18 Comments

The Washington Post looks at webcaster Pandora‘s imminent demise in spite of its popularity (“about 1 million listeners daily” and “40,000 new customers a day”): Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its ‘Last Stand’.

Thanks to the music inudstry’s lobbyists, web radio has to pay twice as much per song as terrestial radio, which only pays a publishing royalty to the songwriters and publishers. In addition to that, web radio also has to pay the record label a “performance royalty” for the master recording:

Traditional radio pays nothing in performance royalties, though SoundExchange is pressing to change that. Satellite radio pays 6 or 7 percent of revenue. And then there are webcasters, which pay per song, per listener.

Using listener figures from Arbitron for XM Satellite Radio, it is possible to estimate that the company will pay about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener.

Gee, that hardly seems fair. These industry lobbyists are the same people kicking themselves for “allowing” MTV to promote their products (i.e., albums) without paying them a royalty for airing promotional videos.

More insanity after the jump…

Continue reading Internet Radio Is Doomed →