Category: .

What’s up with all the pay-to-play music products (except Lala) using the same approaches to drawing up the bill? Why not innovate on metering methods?

capacity based

Every time you download, you get charged. And a download can’t be revoked. So it’s like the iTunes music store and Amazon in that way.

But you can swap one download for another. Delete one, add one.

You pay for capacity. For example, 4GB costs $5 and 1TB costs $30.

listening based

Another way to do it: pay by listening time. You buy, let’s say, 10 hours of listening per month. You can use it for anything you want. You pay a flat fee, which is divvied up according to actual usage.

If you go over then you pay a per-listen rate.

It’s just like cell phone plans.

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What interests me about these is the way they’d encourage some behaviors and discourage others.

By-capacity would be way of charging to have a less unpredictable playlist, because a smaller capacity would mean less range. People whose listening is satisfied by the 250-song playlists of commercial radio wouldn’t need more than a GB.

By-listening-time would divvy up the money more fairly between cool bands and bands who make music people enjoy. Maybe Cold War Kids would lose money while Andrew Lloyd Webber would make even more. Or acts with hits among children — who liten to the same songs over and over — would become really big business.

Godfather Robert Scoble hereby anoints a new buzz favorite: Soundcloud.

I really dig Soundcloud. They have great product discipline and stellar chops at making software.

But I worry about the buzz among techies, because it is such a stupid and brutish force. For example, Scoble describes Soundcloud this way: What is SoundCloud? A way to share music and audio files.

Uh, no. Scoble just described all the litle file hosting services like Fileden.com, Filehut, DenOfFiles, PutYourMP3sHere.com, etc. That’s just simply plain wrong.

Soundcloud is web tools for the practical work of making music. For example, musicians often need to share huge files like a one-file recording of an hourlong jam, in WAV format, which doesn’t really work with standard software. In my experience you need tech chops, a generous ISP, a FTP client, about a day, and plenty of cuss words to make it happen. Or Soundcloud.

But whatever. No point bitching. As much as the attention paid to comparable buzz startups like Delicious and Twitter can be vapid and fickle, Delicious, Twitter, and Soundcloud are all great work, and it’s good when the good guys win.

The Guardian: Collapse in illegal sharing and boom in streaming brings music to executives’ ears

Even though users of streaming services are not necessarily buying more music, the industry benefits by learning more about fans’ tastes. Steve Purdham, CEO and founder of We7, a music streaming service and download store, said: “They may not buy an album, though they have that opportunity, but you can sell them tour tickets and a T-shirt of their favourite band.”

Free plays in the browser are worth more to a band than free plays via a filesharing network that get played back in an MP3 player.

That’s an incentive for bands to make their own song pages rather than waiting for music bloggers and other third parties.

About the original story, my wild guess is that it’s a case of listeners following convenience. People will listen to their second choice before their first choice if it’s easier to access.

I don’t really understand the Universal Music deal with TuneCore, but that’s probably because I don’t know much about the nuts and bolts of the record business. But maybe the value is in establishing a relationship, with an eye towards acquisition in the long run.

Think back to Yahoo! getting a chance to buy Google…

As a song gets more popular, does it get used up? Or does it become more useful as a shared point of reference? Gurdonark points out:

The song which makes the best argument for and against this position is the same song: “Macarena”.

Rob Lord: comment on A plan for codecs

Bundling codecs with browsers is akin to bundling fonts with browsers.

Over on the Pho list, Bob Bellin ran the numbers on the new webcasting deal announced today. Pandora and the big pubs are all saying that the new deal will save them, but Bob says that things are still terminal.

Here’s Bob:

The % option is just a smokescreen, because the per song calculation will always prove higher and the higher of the two calculations is what’s owed. No start up webcasting business can give up more than 25% of their revenue and make a profit. My quick math is as follows – the current new rates translate to about half of what the old numbers did. An webcaster with and AQH of 100,000 would, under the old numbers, owe about $27milliion. So the new numbers would translate to around $14mil, rising to roughly $20 mil. A terrestrial radio station with that size audience would bill between $20mil and $25mil and show a profit of about 255 of that. This assumes a complete local cluster sales staff and the economies of scale that a large cluster supported by an larger corporate structure with many shared costs brings. A webcaster’s cost would be higher and their revenue, (because it is most analogous to network radio as a national vehicle) would generate half the revenue that the terrestrial station would – and that’s with a fully developed sales effort. So they would owe more than their revenue. And even if I’m wrong by a considerable amount (which I doubt – I ran radio stations for a long time and am very fluent with their cost structure and revenue capability), after you add in operating costs, there’s no way to make it with these rates.

I predict that well over 75% will fold when the 2006 money is due. Few and any revenue to speak of in 2006 and fewer have the $ to pay the vig. Did anyone actually run the numbers and determine that there was anything like a path to profitability?

Personally I’m tired of doomsaying. Nothing’s going to be fixed until we all put our cards on the table. Let music radio and webcasting collapse as a whole, and the record business implode the minute that happens. Because the current way of doing things by lobbying rate courts in DC is ridiculous and the job isn’t getting done.

I’ll buy that newspapers in their historical form are going away, but not that publishing as a function distinct from writing is going away.

Writers can’t take it on. It’s a different set of skills, talents, and resources, and it’s time-consuming. It controls the money, and money controls the writers.

And how is this argument different for labels?

If we stopped trying to standardize audio and video file formats and instead standardized APIs for dynamic audio and video, we’d break through the bottleneck.

Web sites would package static media files in whatever format they wanted, then use Javascript to render the files.

This wouldn’t require Apple and Microsoft to give up their patent wars, which they will never do. This would allow Wikipedia to use free formats like Theora, which it does for reasons that also won’t change.

It never works to try to compete on freeness alone; that’s why Ogg hasn’t taken off yet. To get adoption of a new data format you have to compete on features. That’s exactly what dynamic media APIs would do. It would not be possible to create an AJAX remixing tool with AAC or WMA, but it would with dynamic media APIs. It would be possible to leave voice comments. It would be possible to give guitar lessons. Users and sites would adopt the new technology because they wanted the new features.

This came to mind because of these related posts out there:

Ryan Paul at Ars Technica

Sull on Tumblr

See also my Oct 4 2008 post pure AJAX audio formats now a reality