This just in from Ars Technica:

quote:

Buckling under the weight of the Internet radio royalty hike that SoundExchange pushed through last July, Pandora may pull its own plug soon. Despite being one of the most popular Internet radio services, the company still isn't making money, and its founder, Tim Westergren, says it can't last beyond its first payment of the higher royalties.

SoundExchange offered a potential reprieve from the royalty hikes, but that turned out to be a red herring to sneak DRM onto web radio. In the end, SoundExchange was able to initiate a massive (and retroactive) royalty hike on Internet radio stations, imposing per-user fees for each song. Adding insult to injury, the royalties on Internet radio will double for big stations by 2010, to an estimated 2.91 cents per hour per listener—far higher than the 1.6 cents that satellite stations would pay. Radio stations don't pay fees like these yet, but don't worry. SoundExchange is working on fixing that problem.

Pandora, its peers, and many of their collective users have petitioned SoundExchange and politicians multiple times, but nothing has worked. According to the Washington Post, Representative Howard L. Berman (D-CA) is attempting one more last-minute deal between webcasters and SoundExchange, one that could lower the per-song rate set last year, but he isn't optimistic. "If [the negotiations don't] get much more dramatic quickly, I will extricate myself from the process," Berman said.

If Berman is unsuccessful, Pandora will have to pay 70 percent of its projected 2008 revenues of $25 million. "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved," Pandora's founder Tim Westergren told the Post, "we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money."

While it's true that SoundExchange has had DRM and radio broadcast flags on its agenda for some time now, representatives of the company have also justified its stance on higher royalties from revenue and profit standpoints. Stations like Pandora, SoundExchange argues, have a higher profit margin and more value because they can broadcast an unlimited number of songs to their users. This dynamic ability stands in contrast to traditional and even satellite radio stations that broadcast a single song on a finite number of channels.

SoundExchange also argues that Internet radio stations could do a lot more to increase their revenue, become profitable, and pay their (arguably high) fees. As much as it pains us to say it, there may be a point here.

There's no doubt that SoundExchange has been strong-arming the Internet radio industry into oblivion. But most Internet radio stations like Pandora offer their services for free, or they offer accounts with more features at incredibly cheap prices. While some stations display ads on their website, Pandora hasn't done itself any favors by offering desktop clients and a wildly popular iPhone application (iTunes link) that rake in millions of users without so much as a single ad. Perhaps, for now, the "just build it and we'll figure out the business model later" approach won't be enough to save this experiment in new media.

We (us Canadians) lost Pandora many moons ago, as their licensing does not permit playing music outside the US. I do miss them.

it seems difficult now, but you will pull thru without

This isn't to do with Pandora as I am from South Africa and don't know about Pandora so I can't comment, but I just wanted to comment on your Blue Beauty photo's, they were beautiful, wow, a reminder of how amazing our planet is, thanks for that. I am new to MixMedia and have no idea what I am doing, so hopefully after reading through this forum I will be a little more informed.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. . .

I believe the whole "royalties" argument is a red herring. The big labels are intent on keeping their music outlets as limited as possible to avoid any further increase of the publics listening options (what I think of as listener dilution).

By preventing us the listeners to pick an ever increasing number of genres and sub-genres to listen to, they hope (and I believe this hope is a false one) that they can keep the general public listening to exactly what they want the general public to listen to.

I think back to the 80's when I started to listen to music. Then there were essentially two sources for music exploration outside of checking out what was on my dorm mates stereo - MTV and Radio. (prior to that it was just the radio) With only two mediums, the record labels had a field day steering our tastes to only a relatively small number of artists and generated huge sales for those artists.

With TV, traditional radio and satellite, things are not much different. MTV and other video channels on TV have lost their influence (though one could argue that Disney and Nickelodeon make up the difference in the 8 - 15 year old crowd), and satellite radio has just too few listeners (I'd also like to see the CD purchasing habits of XM and Sirius listners - I suspect they buy fewer CDs than one might expect). That leaves radio and canned music in public places like retail stores. Which means a return to the good old days of the big labels shoving what they want us to hear down our throats. That local broadcasters are no longer truly local only helps the big media to concentrate their efforts. If there is one programmer say for all Clear channel rock stations, as opposed to a programmer at each and every radio station across the country, they have only a one stop promotion to get their "latest hot group" on the radio across the U.S. I'm sure this is all obvious to the big media marketers who want to promote some artist to be the next 10 million record seller.

The problem for big media is that Internet radio knows no borders. While Pandora may be gone soon (and is gone for Canada), there are loads and loads of small Internet broadcasters out there. I think it's reasonable that if someone wanted to hear 50's and 60's swinging bachelor pad music they'd be able to find several stations on the Internet that would cater to them. If someone wanted to listen to only punk metal, there again, there'd probably be multiple Internet stations that could vie for their listening time. If each genre and sub-genre starts to drip away at the ocean of listeners, sooner or later there will be a cumulative effect of the listenership in broadcast media being so spread out (or diluted) that big media couldn't feasibly promote any one artist using their old models effectively - which is fine with me. The principal here being that the segmented market leads to segmented CD purchases and therefore a significant drop to the "blockbuster" "must have" album.


However, if some of the talked about technologies such as portable Internet radio become reality, then the big media companies would see our drive time listening options widen dramatically and the idea of local or regional markets would be gone in a way they never imagined. No longer would they be able to rely on Clear Channel to promote their artists.

I could go on and on about what ifs and threats to big media, but the bottom line is that I believe big media is intent on keeping listener options as narrow as possible. Big medias answer to this with regard to Internet radio is to tax it out of existence (with outrageous royalties) or at least make it a bit player in the overall listening market. Ultimately, I think this answer will fail.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Rodney,

that would suck, I just found pandora on my iPhone and it almost makes me not need to load any of my tunes. I be sad if it goes south.

quote:

Originally posted by Candice:
This isn't to do with Pandora as I am from South Africa and don't know about Pandora so I can't comment, but I just wanted to comment on your Blue Beauty photo's, they were beautiful, wow, a reminder of how amazing our planet is, thanks for that. I am new to MixMedia and have no idea what I am doing, so hopefully after reading through this forum I will be a little more informed.

Google search Pandora , and you will see that it is a internet radio station that lets you make a station (type in a musical group), and then it plays music that would musically fit on that type of station . The site has a very large selection of music . It's like turning on a radio and listening to random songs by various artists . They play songs on your station similar to your tastes .

I like it . Thanks for making this thread . I used to listen to Pandora about 2 years ago , and completely forgot about it , till now .
It's still up and running