In a guest post for Techcrunch the founder of MP3.com and MP3Tunes, Michael Robertson, declares the actual online music streaming climate death.
The music selling and radio business is increasingly being commoditized. Profits are being squeezed to the point of unsustainability. This spells pending doom for imeem, Pandora, Myspace Music, Slacker and the newest entrant Spotify unless there is an industry-upheaving royalty rate change.
After analyzing both the massively hyped Spotify and the under Best Buy rebooted Napster he mentions that most similar sites, such as Pandora and MySpace Music, so far have failed in making a paid subscription model a viable solution. Music streaming services world wide are living a hard time and UK-based, but CBS owned Last.fm also switched to a compulsory subscription for users outside of the US, UK and Germany because so far they have failed to monetize ads sufficiently in other pats of world.
These may seem dire times, but unless streaming platforms can become more global, it seems that they will struggle to sell ANY real advertising at all and if, the question is will it be sufficient to pay royalties and the rather high wages developers benefit in startups.
Read the complete TC entry here.
Originally posted on August 8, 2009 @ 1:14 pm
Myspace accounts are free.. thus the music that musicians upload for other free users to listen should be free to listen to and not cost anything.
Myspace has not “Failed” in making a “solution” to charging users to listen to music. If that happened then the only people who would give any listen to any music on there would be the rich people.
Myspace keeps their music players FREE so that new up and comers can have their music heard by more then just the people they play live to.
Would you like it if you were a new upcoming band, had no recording deal yet wanted your music to be heard by other people then just those you play to every night, how would you like it if no one could listen to your music because they had to pay before listening to it?
And Radio is what feeds the record labels.. if congress would to have gone through with that idiotic bill, Most stations would either have to change format or Go off air completely.. That would be biting the hand that feeds them, and it’s the foreign record labels that are having the troubles.. If they cut the cost of their cds people would be able to BUY them!