Free Music: Europe vs. the US.

Here in the states, I hear often about this thing called Spotify (or CWM), and how cool it is.But if I go to their websites, I get the "sorry, you don't live in Europe, so no service for you". My obvious question has always been what gives? Why is Europe so "special"? (the closest thing we have to it is Pandora, which is not as cool.)

On the Media, an NPR distributed radio show, has a fairly good description of the US music distribution problems, why they are, and if they might change. See Facing the (free) Music. (note: medium is both in text and audio)

[In the US] "If you want to develop a new business model, you need the record companies to okay their rights. You need the music publishers who represent songwriters, who also own a right within each song that you hear. Often you need artists who have perhaps in their contracts the ability to okay or not okay a new business model. So there are lots of different players within the industry."

[then talking about this cool service called Spotify]... "It's free, in Europe. They'll play you an audio ad and the audio ad synchs up with a video ad that they display at the same time. And then the hope is that you will pay to upgrade for 10 Euros a month.

This is the genius part of it. They hook you with this unlimited free music service, and there's sharing, and it's great. Now you want to plug something in with headphones and walk out the door and listen to it on your mobile device, like an iPhone, you have to be a premium subscriber."

... "There's different rights organizations in Europe that apparently have taken a different stance towards how much they should charge for somebody that streams a song. I've heard estimates that they pay a tenth what they would pay to do the same in the States.

And so, we see all kinds of strange differences where our friends in Europe are able to share playlists, email each other URLs to listen to a song. You can even take it a step further and set the playlist to be collaborative, so that you and your friends can edit the playlist, they can delete the whole thing, do all this stuff that we can't do."