“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”
I’m not one to normally editorialize much; however it seems like something that actually made sense, will probably be looking at closing it’s doors due to licensing fees. The idea… Pandora Music Genome® Project. Sign up, tell the site what music and musicians you happen to like, and it’ll find music and match from other offerings in it’s catalog that you just may like as well.
I’ve had an account for years. And won’t even lie… it’s shaped my taste in music in so many genres where I thought I’d like only one or two in a particular genre. Next thing I know, I have like twenty favorites. And armed with that information, I’d open up iTunes, buy the music that I found on Pandora and go about my day. Even share that knowledge with people around the water cooler, online, et al.
Enter the bad guy(s). Normally I’d just go straight at the fact that the RIAA had created SoundExchange merely to collect royalties from music that’s played on satellite and internet radio. Mind you, there’s no model for collecting royalties for music played over the normal radio at all. And if you were to think about it… it’s the most backwards way of thinking. Internet entities that are willing to work with the RIAA and each of it’s arms - I can’t even keep up, so I’ll just use the RIAA as common term from hereon - that the RIAA possess, it seems like people are getting penalized for having genuinely good ideas and all the RIAA wants to do is capitalize for as long as they can, then shut them down.
Yet… Pandora opened up the doors for new musicians that most people had never heard of. Which in most simple terms… would mean that more sales for those lesser known artists, the ones that the labels don’t exactly allocate advertising to and thus garner less sales might have yet another avenue to be seen and heard.
But no. The RIAA wants it’s money. The same money that the RIAA has collected and yet they “cannot find the artists” to give them the money they owe. Or this is the same RIAA that basically gives the artists about $2.00 out of $20.00 - and the RIAA didn’t create anything. And don’t forget… this is the same RIAA that had about 700mb of e-mails leaked out that detailed on how it would create fake torrents and trackers all to disrupt p2p traffic.
Simply put… RIAA is clearly a dirty organization that has yet to catch up with the fact that it’s poor sales are clearly attributed to the death of the CD single - face it, only one to two good songs are on each music CD released, to find more, it’s rare - and the fact that the distribution model shifted from in-store to online quicker than they were willing to change to… and no DRM will last forever. It’ll be overcome in mere minutes. And here is a pretty legitimate unique idea that for once broadened my personal music tastes instead of hampered it with playing music over and over from artists that a certain label thought should sell well.
Here’s to hoping that Pandora finds a way to continue to exist.
Read more about this situation in a more informational manner over at the Washington Post.
