The author's bleak conclusion on music's future on the web is an interesting one. As popular as this media is, it really does seem to be in trouble with a lack of innovation and huge legal barriers.
With a vast majority of sites simply scraping copyrighted work from YouTube, the RIAA essentially has this industry in its pocket (a massive take-down campaign could crush these startups).
The only real solution I see is a complete rebuilding of the industry. It will take time but bands can be weened off of the whole "million dollar contract" thing--just like us Entrepreneurs are breaking away from traditional VC models.
Take-down campaigns won't crush startups. We get served with these notices everyday and we're happy to comply because we believe artists should be compensated for their work.
But the model is broken.
What will crush startups are the lawsuits by the major labels and their complete stubborn philosophy that online music companies have to capitulate to their unreasonable demands and pricing.
The future is the music company that can successfully market new artists in a way that the benefits to them greatly outweigh the benefits offered by a major label.
I was just wondering this the other day. Back in '99 or 2000 it felt like a music revolution was in full swing. Music labels were ignoring p2p and everyone was downloading.
Now, it all seems stale. I love Pandora and similar services, but they've hardly broken open the doors of the music label oligopoly. I
It seems the ridiculous lawsuits is working. And artists are still more than eager to give their music away on mySpace, etc.
I am in US right now. That's why I have no access to Spotify. I believe that majority of the users here are interested in using Spotify but have no idea what it is.
Could you be more specific on what makes Spotify so unique? I heard that it is just another subscription based music player like Rhapsody but with better UI. Correct me if I am wrong.
not being in the us I dont know what rhapsody does, but :)
the desktop client is free to use in an unlimited way, there are adverts but they are pretty unintrusive.
they have a pretty massive library, at first there was a few holes but they are getting better and better.
their player interface is pretty decent, but their software rocks, I can search and start playing a song faster than I can with itunes playing local songs, if it goes offline, they have usually cached most of my popular playlists, I can have svn timing out and somehow this thing still plays new songs.
along with a mobile application that lets you store offline playlists.
from wikipedia it sounds like rhapsody is a pretty similar service, and if so I dont really understand what more people can want as a music consumer, its a pretty damn big step compared to just a few years ago
As far as music being available, I think it's a decent option, but it's still beholden (as far as I know) to the music label oligopoly.
I'd like to see something that gives the music labels a run for their money, doesn't require artists to sign away all their rights in return for sales and makes sense for all players in the business, not just the big-money interests.
with services like cdbaby (who are signed on to spotify), independent artists can get pretty direct access to consumers, its only one separation from artists directly controlling their own distribution.
to be fair its been like that for a while with cdbaby and itunes, lets hope we start seeing a larger throughput of artists "go it alone" now that this is all in place, or maybe we were wrong about the labels (and the artists) all along.
With a vast majority of sites simply scraping copyrighted work from YouTube, the RIAA essentially has this industry in its pocket (a massive take-down campaign could crush these startups).
The only real solution I see is a complete rebuilding of the industry. It will take time but bands can be weened off of the whole "million dollar contract" thing--just like us Entrepreneurs are breaking away from traditional VC models.