Why the music industry is trying—and failing—to crush Pandora

[Magic]

Why the music industry is trying

This is a very long article that goes into detail explaining court rulings and laws, but once you skip past all that mumbo jumbo, it is interesting to see how unfairly Pandora has been treated compared to industry owned music broadcasters, like Spotify.

The article also tells of the industry greed....which is nothing we didn't already know.

Pandora already pays out more than half of its revenue in royalties. It’s just that most of this money (49% of its revenue) goes to record companies and recording artists, not publishers and songwriters. It’s almost the exact opposite situation to the paradigm that exists in terrestrial radio—where publishers get 1.7% of revenues and record companies get nothing. One argument is that the royalty situation should be sorted out between the publishing and recording companies, which, as we discussed earlier, are often divisions of the same parent corporations.
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“We are disappointed to see a handful of powerful music companies fixate on a single innovator that already pays more than any other form of radio,” a Pandora spokesman says in an email. “Why single out Pandora when terrestrial broadcasters—with several times the combined revenue of Pandora—have never been required to pay performing artists a penny and offer songwriters a lower percentage of revenue?”

 

[Aero]

Just another example of how crooked things are. Big business stomping on the little guy.

 

[LG]

Watching a biography of sorts a few days ago about the greatest music promoter in the business today there was an interesting observation by a few people about the record companies reaction to Napster when they arrived on the scene. Instead of trying to work out a business arrangement with Napster, they kept faith with their usual "Al Capone" approach to running their monopoly and have never recovered.

I know nothing about Pandora, Spotify or the other streaming sites on the internet, I play my vinyl and CD's these days, if my favorite Classical station was still broadcasting I would set up my tuner again, but sadly CBC shut down their best musical source a couple years ago.

 

[bohohippybeatnic]

Watching a biography of sorts a few days ago about the greatest music promoter in the business today there was an interesting observation by a few people about the record companies reaction to Napster when they arrived on the scene. Instead of trying to work out a business arrangement with Napster, they kept faith with their usual "Al Capone" approach to running their monopoly and have never recovered.

I know nothing about Pandora, Spotify or the other streaming sites on the internet, I play my vinyl and CD's these days, if my favorite Classical station was still broadcasting I would set up my tuner again, but sadly CBC shut down their best musical source a couple years ago.

To this day the record companies still blame Napster and the Internet for the state of the industry when it was there failure to adapt to the new technology that did them in aswell as the quality of music being as bad as it is.

 

[LG]

To this day the record companies still blame Napster and the Internet for the state of the industry when it was there failure to adapt to the new technology that did them in aswell as the quality of music being as bad as it is.

I agree BHB, and let's also never forget the untold billions in profits the labels made reselling their old catalogs over and over again in various digital formats.

They are victims of their own short sightedness and greed, the tragic part in this story is the artists are the ones paying the biggest price and the fans too it's entirely possible we will see the end of the "LP" as we know it over the next 5 years. People seem to just want to buy singles, makes me feel sad.

 

[Aero]

People seem to just want to buy singles, makes me feel sad.

You can blame Steve Jobs and his business model for that.

 

[AboutAGirl]

That's really sad that they're doing that to Pandora. I think they also resent these progressive ideas since they haven't come up with any of these big new ideas in decades.

I would strongly contest the idea that people want to only buy singles. The album format is still 100% crucial to the music business and that's not going to change any time soon.

Think about it this way -- it's a loooooooot easier and more lucrative to spend a lot of money pushing one album release than it is to spend a lot of money pushing individual singles one at a time. If you're focusing on pushing an album, you can put much more money into the promotion, trying to do that one track at a time would break the bank. And pushing an album on the power of one to five singles makes literally three to fifteen times as much as individual singles do. When a fan buys a whole album, that's a lot more money they're spending than if they buy one single every so many months.

Fact is the album format makes more money so we'll never see the labels abandon it. Pundits have been predicting the end of the album format for 15 years but they were just blowing smoke, it hasn't moved in that direction. As for the fans, sure people buy individual songs if they aren't into the rest of the album, but that's how it should be. It was awful in the 90s and before, having to buy a whole album for one good song. But good albums still sell in whole. You can see that when entire albums end up on the charts with these big artists.

 

[LG]

You can blame Steve Jobs and his business model for that.

I won't say what I think of Steven Jobs except he will be remembered as one of the most despised CEO's in corporate history even though there is no denying his intelligence and business acumen.

Bill Gates has become a much better person now than when he and his buddies started MS decades ago.

I hate i-tunes for many reasons Aero, quality being one and the devastation it has wreaked upon the musical landscape.