It little comforts the mules that Internet Radio stations have no new resolution from an agreement that comes of recent thrashing between the RIAA and outlets for online music sales.
As the deal (still) stands, in 2010, the CRB – Copyright Royalty Board – will more than double the per-stream royalties due from $0.0008 to $0.0019 with a couple of flat fees tacked onto that.
The RIAA and other industry groups will eventually fail, because it will eventually be realized that for over a decade, music has been widely available online.
The problem is that “eventually” can take a helluva long time to get here, and ground-breaking utilities such as Pandora, a client-side extension of the Music Genome Project, may fold in the time between.
The fate of Pandora and its kind seems rather like that of the investment banks bailing and being bailed in recent weeks – they’re too big to fail. Not as individual companies and services, but as an idea. Somehow, some way, someday (hey, is that a song?), the mules are certain streaming, personalized music will not only persevere, but expand into iTunes-sized market reach.
Until then, it might not be a bad idea to consider properly monetizing sites such as Pandora. Marketers are a stubborn lot, often unconcerned about demonstrable returns on flighty “investments” – there’s a whole glossary of fogged terms to describe how they measure success without measuring success – but flopping out an advertisement when a user interacts with the application is probably not enough.
It’s not Tivo, and while a fickle audience might cast about for alternatives, a paid subscription carrot combined with the stick of audio advertisements slapped between every so many tracks might be worth a thought.
The mules would suffer through an ad or two for the continued ability to listen to what have become large investments of personal time creating personal stations and “genetically related” play lists – or they’d clap their hooves to their wallets and buy a monthly, which should offset much of the bumped royalties pain, better still if done in advance of the 2010 deadline.
What strikes us as beyond strange is the lack of contextual advertising being touted by Pandora and other highly interactive platforms. Choice of music, both in overall and in-the-moment context, is not a complete portrait of the consumer, but trends of musical tastes are at least as relevant as a random Google search.
The mules are listening to Megadeth today, old school – if there’s a horse blanket with an Iron Maiden silkscreen on it, tell us about it between tracks, show it in the area reserved for album art, leave it there in the playlist history for a half hour, persist the more recent ads even after a station-change, and give us the option to move back to the “ad song” with easy links to buy.
Not a lark to program, but mules enjoy nothing more than suggesting how other creatures can go about working while we graze the far pasture.
