Category: .

Ari Shohat, in a comment on the TechCrunch article on the sorry state of streaming music:

I call the state of things now “Subprime Royalty Rates”. By that I mean that we have a few ventures/startups that are willing to pay the outrageous fees NOW, for the sake of living on another few months or years, even though common sense tells everyone that the rates are totally unworkable to a business model.

Subprime Royalty rates because just like with all the house buyers who thought they could take on overpriced house rates in the bubble, we have a bubble of royalty prices which a few are perpetuating with venture funds. Eventually this house of cards will fall too, just because they pay them now doesn’t mean that’s how economics will play out.

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See also: Cait comment here about Last.fm::

My understanding, and it’s certainly the impression given by Lsast itself, is that CBS is not interfering in the day to day business of Lasat. Ultimately, they were independent for as long as they really could be, and nowthey need to rationalise their business model.

Speaking as a long (and I mean looooong) term subscriber to Last, and to Flickr, and other really brilliant and wonderful things that I love and wish to support with my hard earned wages, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for users who want it all to remain free.

I realise this is not a particularly fsahionable opinion , but you know. Get real, you freeloadaing idiots! (Heh).

Bruce Warilla posted this narsty masterpiece:

I question his premise that filesharing is going down, but I agree that amassing big collections of files isn’t a permanent thing. It’s a pain in the ass to have all these files, you’re better off leaving them out in the cloud and snarfing them as the need arises. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly the value proposition of on-demand subscription streaming services like Rhapsody and Spotify.

The Sorry State Of Music Startups:

streaming music startups don’t want more people using their service, because they lose money from every one of them, and the perceived success from having more users makes it harder for them to plead with the labels to give them better deals.

The big music labels don’t like streaming music because it doesn’t help them offset declining CD sales, and the evidence now suggests that streaming doesn’t lead to music downloads. Everything we’re hearing says that the labels would like to see streaming music startups just go away for now so that they can focus on maximizing paid downloads and extend that ultimate surrender date.

So when you hear about labels renegotiating streaming deals to help out music startups, be skeptical. They’re likely lowering the rates from 1 cent down to something closer to .4 cents per stream. And all that means is that these startups will bleed a little slower. But they’re still going to go out of business, because the venture firms are done investing in them.

One complaint about this TechCrunch piece: it’s easy to be negative and indeed pundits are always negative about internet music, unless they’re writing about Apple. We’re really not that fucked. Just challenged.

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Re-reading this my comment sounds off-key, like it might or might not be sarcastic. I really did mean to say that all is not lost.

RT @roberto_fisher New player strategy… A portable floating player over myspace pages and internet. Name? Moose

The Lawsuit Threshold is the maximum success of an internet music project before it attracts a lawsuit.

My old auto insurance company, Esurance, messed up and forgot to file a notice with my state to say that my policy was paid up, so the state came down on me like a ton of bricks. Naturally I canceled the policy. Now it turns out that Esurance treated the cancellation request as a request to renew, and charged me.

Another data point: the part of their web site that you only see once you buy a policy and try to sign in doesn’t work in Firefox. The page doesn’t even load.

Streaming Radio: Last.fm Silences Third-Party Mobile Apps:

Hot off an announcement that they’d be charging for radio access outside the US, UK and Germany, Last.fm has said that all non-official mobile clients will be banned. This isn’t going over well.

The spoiled-child POV is that this sux because they’re dix! But really this is nothing but good in the long run. When companies stop pretending to pay the bills, they help the market to become rational. Either they can afford the bill and should pay it or they can’t afford it and shouldn’t incur it. They have realized that they can’t afford it and aren’t going to incur it any more. Credit executive leadership at Last.fm.

As you could imagine, this kind of blows for a lot of people. Windows Mobile users will no longer be able to use Pocket Scrobbler, Symbian folks will have their beautiful baby, Mobbler, ripped from their hands, and BlackBerry owners will soon find FlipSide, a pay app, rendered silent.

To the Pocket Scrobblerers, Mobblerers and FlipSiders I say: there’s no substitute for real freedom. If some vendor is generous or forgetful enough to cover your bills, all you can say is thank you. And if /when the free ride runs out, just say thank you.

gurdonark wrote this as a comment and I thought it needed to be a post instead. So here it is as a post:

Pixieguts is an Australian vocalist who does vocals for electronic artists throughout the world.
http://www.last.fm/music/pixieguts. She’s wracked up 19,000 plays from 4,000 listeners.

She has a weblog, http://pixie-guts.blogspot.com. She releases at jamendo. She has a podcast.
http://pixieguts.jamendo.net/2009/02/05/pixicast-electronic-podcast-hosted-by-voide/

She’s organized a Ning called Pixies Palace which is a more or less a member/performer network of shared interests.
http://pixiespalace.ning.com/, with 160 members.

Marie, or Pixieguts, collaborates often, networks a great deal, and pushes forward a free download culture with aplomb. She’s not doing it with lots of money (I believe she types legal documents for a day job), nor immense connections in the industry (she’s in a part of Australia away from the center of things) nor the need to utilize the tawdry, the trendy or the self-aggrandizing. She just sings on music, and listens to music, and gets people together who do.

There’s lots of room for pixieguts in this world–and a lot of what she and her best collaborators (such as Northcape and Adrian Carter) do takes place not only on netlabels, but at last.fm.

jbum emailed a fix to a problem with my greasemonkey script for inserting Yahoo! Media Player aka Goose into a web page. It now handles https://mail.google.com correctly, meaning that it doesn’t break it any more.

When you make free software you don’t do much work, usually, but then you need to be the maintainer for a really long time. It’s a life long commitment if you’re up for it.

A friend emailed to say that a bunch of his comments here hadn’t showed up, so I checked the spam filter and found them. This is probably some helpfully destructive feature of my comment spam filter, like detecting an IP address that has been used by a spammer in the past.

In conclusion, if you find comments not showing up don’t hesitate to give me a ping. It’s going to happen and there’s no point it letting it break things.