Media Consolidation

Frugal Dad has a great infographic on how bad things have gotten in the media world.

Note the following sites that are attempting to fix this:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• RootStrikers
  
• FreePress.net

RIAA/MPAA

Slashdot pointed out a piece in the Harvard Business Review on how the “RIAA/MPAA: the Greatest Threat To Tech Innovation”. Amazon would certainly agree with this! (Note the illegal prime number)

Courtney Love on Record Labels

Salon.com back in 2000 posted an article by Cortney Love about the recording industry. (good read)

"Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.

I'm talking about major label recording contracts"

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."

News: Music Streaming

Apple Kills Lala Music Service

"Apple closed down the cloud-based Lala music service Friday for reasons unknown, after acquiring it in December. Lala members can still access their online collections, but only until May 31, when Apple will take the service offline completely.
...
The second option, which seems incredibly likely, is that Apple plans to launch a cloud-based music service based on Lala’s technology at some point after May 31.

The key: Lala’s song-identification-and-upload technologies (also discontinued as of today) allowed users to mirror their local music — including an iTunes library — onto cloud-based Lala accounts.

By purchasing Lala, Apple acquired technology that would enable it to bounce everyone’s iTunes libraries to online servers, so iTunes users would be able to access their collections from a variety of Apple’s devices: laptops, desktops, Apple TV set-top boxes, iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches.

As of today, Apple doesn’t let you transfer songs from iTunes to your iPhone OS device without one of its proprietary USB cables. Once it launches a cloud-based music service, those cables (or a Wi-Fi or 3G connection) would only be necessary for caching purposes, because all these devices would access the same web-based music collection.

While Apple’s hardware has embraced the cloud since .mac (now Mobile Me), its iTunes software lags far behind. Today’s news, while unfortunate for Lala users, represents good news for iTunes users, because it’s a sign that iTunes too could be headed for the cloud, obviating their need to manage music collections manually between multiple devices."

Pandora's Failed Business Model

I'm totally bummed! Pandora was this online radio station that enabled you to customize your playlists so that you listened to more of the music you liked to hear, but still heard new stuff that was within that range. (Their website explains their product and how it works better.)

It started out as a completly free, and an add-free service. This worked well to bring in users, and increase their name recognition. Then they decided to introduce commercials into the radio stream to try and keep them afloat. Being spoiled on the add free music seen, it was a bummer to listen to the silly adds, but the product was good enough, and if I really didn't want the adds, for a fee i could join a subscription and get the music add-free.

Well now it seems that they can not keep themselves afloat with the adds, so they are now are forcing users to pay for service. At first I thought it was a joke, as it seems like such a dumb idea.

What are they offering? (a) radio station, (b) ability to customize music listening in a clever way. There are plenty of online radio streams out there that don't charge. Why would anyone pay for theirs? If I got to specifically list the songs I want to hear, and how often I want to hear them, that would be one thing, but pandora is simply a radio station. You say you like stuff, and it plays stuff ~like~ it. You don't get to hear what you want. Why would you pay for that?!?!?

To me, it looks like they have yet another failed business model. I wonder how long it takes for them to go the way of nabster?



The crazy part of all this is that their doom lies directly in the lap of the music industry with all of their stupid and greedy fees that they are tacking on to online music. My guess is that Pandora was responsible for a huge decrease in online music piracy, as folks could listen to good music via them, rather then having to deal with the hassle of downloading their own music and coming up with their own playlists. Now with the end of pandora, I bet music copying will go up.