Sadly, Pandora Is Still Going Bankrupt
michaelrobertson.com
michaelrobertson.com
They wonder why we pirate songs and they're losing money.
I'll give you an analogy of a research sample I got from a book.
Bee's by their nature or intelligence you may call it are trained to believe that light at the end of a tunnel is the escape. A rational and even sound analysis in nature. Now if you put a dozen bees in a glass bottle, and point the closed end towards the window where light is shining, all the bees instinctively fly towards that direction of the light and eventually die of exhaustion.
In the case of the bees what was rational in one environment was render completely useless in another.
Your critique of the industry would be more trenchant if it wasn't tipped with rationalization. Books are pretty expensive too. Authors --- publishers, even --- make virtually no money on most titles. And yet! They won't make them available for free download! Let's take the books, too!
The spectacle of the music industry portraying itself as "good" and music fans as "evil" is a great comic irony of our time.
The long term loser of this war will be the labels, and good riddance.
Not to be a complete relativist, but it's naive to believe that the way we formulate moral rules (e.g. how we define stealing) isn't historically conditioned. This is a moment when that's visible because conditions are changing faster than our rules. The rules will have to change. As with all such changes, some entrenched interests will lose. That the record industry turns out to be the loser this time is, for anyone who knows how they've comported themselves in the past, a feature not a bug. (Yeah I know I'm repeating myself and that the latter bit is irrelevant to your point, but on this subject I can't help it: the karmic comeuppance is just too tasty.)
And, once upon a time, record labels paid radio stations to get songs on the air. That was outlawed, but it does show that what's considered "normal" now wasn't always, and might not be in the future.
Maybe this needs to be reversed. I'm sure there are some smaller labels who would be more than happy to pay the stations to get some of their tunes on the air.
Frankly, I think it's preposterous that it was outlawed to begin with, and the ramifications are clear: the only songs that get playtime are the songs that are "known" and the only songs that are "known" are the songs big enough to have a big label behind them. And since smaller players can't pay the stations to play their unknown artists, the big labels are able to make unreasonable demands on the stations because the alternative[1] is outlawed.
Note: the entirety of this comment is hinged around the assumption of validity of the quoted comment, I've not verified if this is true or not, I simply took the claim as true and ran with it.
[1] That is, the alternative method that would generate a profit, specifically, taking money from labels wishing to promote their artists, in exchange for the possible loss of listeners. When less listeners = less advertising dollars, the loss of revenue needs to be subsidized elsewhere, and accepting money from smaller labels (or even the artists themselves), is an obvious way to subsidize that.
You're assuming an interesting relationship between the "current resources" and the "should play" curves.
Each radio station has a fairly fixed amount of "play time" and there aren't that many radio stations. I think that it's reasonably likely that "big music" would buy up all the time worth buying at prices that the little guy couldn't match.
Note - I'm not saying such restrictions are a good thing, I'm just saying that it's not a choice between happy unicorns and ugly trolls.
Of course, "big music" already does use various forms of "not money" to "promote" their folk. Play the game, and you get phone interviews, early release, special versions with local flavor, and some free tix to a concert that is going to be sold out no matter what your radio station does. That can't be matched by a smaller label, let alone some genius in a garage.
And that would immediately solve this problem of the stations having to pay the label. That would introduce competition where competition is currently outlawed.
A radio station needs to play some "hits". If the price of the hits is "you don't play anything indie" AND money....
Yea they do check out the public library system.
Also if you like scifi check out Baen free library. There are also a few articles on the results of them giving away many of their books for free.
After all, who cares if you get 100000000 views on YouTube if you never make a dime from it?
It's just like Hulu and the TV studios: they don't care if they lose out on the "promotion" of their product to the millions of viewers around the world by limiting viewership to the US, b/c they have no way to monetize foreign viewers.
I am surprised that none of you brought up Marie Digby or Katy Perry. But then again, their careers mirrored that of Souljah Boy: free promotion did little to help their sales until the traditional studio machine kicked in.
The Arctic Monkeys may not have made money from their free promotion, but the free promotion got them the contracts that finally got them money.
It may be true that once established, free promotion will only do so much for sales. So then what?
Stop whaling and start catching tuna. Instead of signing artists that established their own fan bases, sign more, newer artists and don't spend so much money overengineering all the audio into flat loudness. Then, offer access to the catalog on a sliding scale - the more new, unestablished artist impressions, the cheaper the licensing fee for the time period. So you get paid a reasonable fee for a site that enables 24/7 Michael Jackson, or you drum up cheap awareness of new artists as sites like Pandora seek to institute thesixtyone-like rewards and incentives for listening to new music.
Studios chase whales because in a hit-driven industry, one successful whale will pay for his own marketing, and all costs associated with several tons of tuna (good or bad).
Think of it like the App Store: a few successes drive the system.
It sucks, because labels and consequently artists will be missing out on the revenue and promotion that might come from wider web broadcasting.
I think that whoever succeeds in this area will do something very similar, working with indie artists from the very beginning, maybe even producing their albums.
Charge more!!!!! People love and highly value your service. There are many, many people who would rather pay $5, $10, $20 or more per month to ensure that Pandora stays alive. How about limiting the number of songs you can listen to on the free iPhone client and selling a premium client for $9.99? They have 200K iPhone users.
I love Pandora, but they're not trying very hard to monetize.