One of the more useful tools that the Windows Sidebar has available is the Pandora gadget. It's a rather simple version of the Pandora streaming web radio website, which allows you to type in a single artist, and Pandora then creates a radio station for you based on that artist and others that make similar types of music. It's a rather complicated formula, but it hits more than it misses, and it allows you to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to any song that comes up to help the program give you what you want. You can also type in other artists you like to either help narrow things down or broaden the musical scope of your radio station. The gadget is simple, and it works well.
It was running on my computer last night and I noticed something for the first time. Most of the time when I am listening I am surfing the Internet, or writing something or another (Right now I am listening to a Los Campesinos!-based radio station, in fact). Last night I was watching football, but still had the Pandora station playing in the background. Because I wasn't on the computer, I had left everything on my desktop. At one point the Pandora music stopped in the middle of the song. Coming over to the computer I saw a notice over the gadget that I had never seen before.
“Are you still listening? We pay for every song we play, so we don't want to play to an empty room.”
We pay for every song we play, so we don't want to play to an empty room.
Fucking hell.
I haven't been using Pandora save by gadget for awhile. I hadn't been paying attention to the various changes that have taken place there.
Once upon a time...
Pandora was a cost-free, ad-free Internet radio service. Those days are a distant dream, now. It started in a rather conspicuous manner, with audio ads suddenly cropping up in between songs. Then Pandora moved to side-by-side free and paid models. Now, with the free version, you are limited to 40 hours of listening per month (roughly an hour and fifteen minutes per day), there is a limit to the number of songs you can skip per hour, and there is a limit to the amount of songs you can skip per month.
Oh, and every hour you don't touch your Pandora, that gracious little message pops up.
Pandora's pay-service is only $36 for a year, but it's just another example of the now discomforting truth.
Like hip-hop and the music, free streaming music has died (Glenn Branca, you were so close).
It's true. For awhile, it seemed that free streaming music might be the music industry's answer to downloading. No, it wouldn't have in any way kept people from using their favorite Torrent program (BitComet, natch), but it was a way for them to give many people what they wanted, free music to listen to, while still providing the music industry with money, via advertising fees. They didn't have to give away the whole album, which is something they've fought tooth and nail against ever since Napster burst on the scene, and it had quantifiable, replayable value. If you couldn't get it for yourself, you'd be more likely to continue going to the place where you could get it. This is also how gourmet restaurants were born.
It was a mutually agreeable relationship, until it became apparent that advertising fees, no matter the amount of traffic a site could command, were simply not enough to deal with high volume music streaming. If a site like Pandora can't command high enough advertising fees to offer streaming music for free, it is safe to assume that there's no hope.
Hell, check the current landscape.
MySpace Music, long the purveyor of free streaming music from bands, has been a great equalizer. There's absolutely nothing to stop me from checking out obscure local bands from a thousand miles away over Lil Wayne's website except for a picture of Weezy like this:
Well, until now.
MySpace Music is almost certainly going to become a pay site. One where you have to pay to listen to streaming music. It's a demoralizing blow, and one that particularly hurts smaller artists, who have long used MySpace as one of the few high-profile platforms where their music can be heard. If you have to pay for music on MySpace, logically you're far more likely to check out the music you already enjoy rather than experiment with a bunch of new shit. You're far more likely to listen to new shit when it's free. It's the reason why Weezy and Gucci Mane saw their stars rise so exponentially in short periods of time: They gave away free mixtapes that showcased their talents so, by the time they had a paid product out, people were so eager to hear new shit from them they ponied up. Hell, that's the way the Very Best made a name for themselves.
With that gone, MySpace will force bands and listeners in these niches into other markets, but it seems unlikely that any of these markets will have the random traffic, the millions of listening ears, that MySpace offered. In a double-blow, MySpace had also just recently purchased smaller streaming music companies iLike and imeem, both of which were ingested by the Rupert Murdoch-owned giant. Now neither of those services will be available to offer free streaming music even at a small-scale level.
MOG was supposed to be the big new service that offered free streaming music to customers. They signed deals with all four major labels and an number of indie labels to provide all manner of music to customers for free, paid for by advertising. But MOG was forced to relent. The price of licensing music on that high of a level is simply too expensive to pay for with ads. MOG's CEO David Hyman put it really simply when he said, “You just can't make it work.”
In Europe, Spotify was breaking down these barriers, making precisely those exact circumstances work to an astounding effect. Spotify was being an iTunes-killer, a genuine alternative to music piracy, and the Internet's next big thing. In wake of their success, Spotify began plans to expand into the United States by the end of this year. News has recently come out that the service will be delayed for a 2010 launch, and the reason for doing so is that it seems, even to Spotify, that a free ad-based service is simply impossible in the United States.
It seems likely that the music industry's next move is towards using a service like Spotify, probably allowing for streaming and downloads, but building the fee for such a service into the cost of your Internet. It makes sense, but the major problems will be creating an avenue for independent artists to use this service and making sure the money collected by the service is distributed appropriately.
Given that stream playcounts can be calculated and downloads can be quantifiably tracked, and given Spotify's track record in Europe, it seems like Spotify would at least be a worthy starting point for such a service. Getting permission from the hundreds upon hundreds of publishing companies, who own the rights to playing the songs they have, in the United States and giving smaller artists an easy-to-use doorway to enter into this agreement will be the big keys in making sure a service like this don't bottleneck our ability to listen to music.
Free streaming music is dead, but hopefully it'll cause a move towards a system that works out better for all invovled.
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