Get Ready For a Streaming Music Die-Off 370
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."
Grooveshark (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:The article is FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
The record labels want online streaming to die. I've not followed the pricing too closely, but the cost per stream is something like 10x the price of a terrestrial radio station. That is why Pandora I believe was trying to purchase an FM station somewhere. The rates are lower if you have a terrestrial radio signal that then also streams IIRC.
Re:It's a doomed race against time (Score:4, Interesting)
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. They must have realised that their production advantage would lessen as the cost of making music came down. 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?
These streaming services should blame themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The article is FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
It is just a matter of finding correct monetization strategy.
Just look at the pie charts - Pandora already has the system in place for music discovery, which is the coordination problem that the corporate model provided one solution for. Once bands don't need corporate music middlemen, they can get half of the revenue, or more.
I've heard a bunch of great stuff on Pandora that I'd never heard _of_ before. Apparently there were a bunch of rock bands in the early 70's that achieved very little commercial success but recorded lots of fantastic music. I assume they each got a little piece of each of the thousand times Pandora played me the same blasted ad for an Intel ultrabook (which are overpriced).
Getting new bands into the new system is the challenge. Their odds are low with the A&R man, so going into something like Pandora makes a bunch of sense. Pandora even has the filtering technology in place to detect the turkeys.
Of course a random op-ed on RWW carries more credence than an entire industry, right?
A large factor in this mess (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sans lyrics, please (Score:4, Interesting)