Well this is just great!! Recently I wrote about Pandora’s entry into the iPhone app market. Pandora lets you create “radio stations” of your favorite music by picking an artist and then Pandora finds other music that it thinks you will like. From there you can customize the results until you have crafted the perfect station for you.
Now it sounds like Pandora may throw in the towel, much to the consternation of its users, me included. The reason being is the fees that they are now being required to pay in order to play music online.
Last year, the Copyright Royalty Board handed down a decision that internet radio stations would have to pay a performance fee to artists each time a song is played. This is something that traditional radio currently isn’t required to do. This fee coupled with standard licensing fees means that Pandora will pay 70% of its revenue toward these requirements. All this is supposedly being done on behalf of the musicians who put so much hard work into their music. I have no doubt that musicians work hard for their money. I only doubt the sincerity of those imposing these fees.
Pandora currently has ads on its website that are part of the site design and change periodically when you input feedback on music choices. This is an unobtrusive solution to displaying the ads and are often times well designed. Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren has even suggested running audio ads periodically while listening. I don’t have a problem with this either.
A TechCrunch article over the weekend suggests that maybe Pandora should be the sacrificial lamb in this ongoing battle with the RIAA and the internet. In the article, Mike Arrington says that perhaps sacrificing Pandora will show the RIAA and the artists how wrong their position has been. I definitely agree that there is greediness although I don’t know how much of it comes from the artists. To me this just seems like an area that is being picked on out of fear.
Pandora is unlike anything else out there. Short of buying every song you might want to listen to, the ability to customize your listening is an absolute dream. The problem is that Pandora and other internet radio is a great place to find new music to which you might not otherwise be exposed. As a matter of fact, I have purchased quite a bit of music that I was exposed to through internet radio. To kill off Pandora and others who play music online is not the way to go.
Our only hope is that the powers-that-be are so stupid that they will eventually cast themselves into the pit of irrelevance.
