Survival of the richest

I didn’t know Pandora was in trouble until Brad e-mailed me about it over the weekend.  Pandora is a great service, and while I can’t tell you specifically what new artists I discovered from using it, I can tell you that it kept me awake a lot of nights when I was working third shift.  I also won’t bother explaining what Pandora is all over again, Brad did a great job of that, but I will tell you that the failure of Pandora would be the next domino to fall toward Internet radio’s complete disappearance.  The main obstacle Internet radio stations are facing is the same cast-iron strangler of much of 21st-century American life:  fucking corporations.

I have to disagree with Brad here and say that the RIAA, along with other corporate players like media conglomerates, is absolutely responsible for Pandora’s dire straits.  We can talk about the things Pandora can do to save itself, we can talk about creating “new revenue streams” or how selling more advertising could stave off the end, we can talk about a subscription model, social networking, mobile integration, and a dozen other things, and they might indeed save Pandora.  But none of that addresses the disproportionately large royalty fees Internet radio stations pay in comparison to terrestrial and satellite radio stations.  As Brad quoted from TechCrunch, thanks to the congressional lobbies and well-placed political friends of companies like Clear Channel, media conglomerates pay absolutely nothing in royalty fees, while satellite radio stations pay about 1.6 cents per song and Internet radio stations will pay 2.91 cents per song by 2010. This is a major problem for small companies, especially those financed by venture capital like Pandora, and asking them to bend over and just take it is ridiculous.  An analogous situation would be your income taxes being doubled while the IRS says “your ass better make more money to make up the difference, and fuck your babies’ dinners and diapers in the meantime.”  Motherfucking Clear Channel would probably eat your babies if it could.  If it meant their Arbitron ratings would go up, I’m certain it would eat your babies.

I don’t mean for this to turn into an essay on my particular socio-politico-whatever worldview, and I’ll spare you a long(er)-ass rant about how free market economics is killing the entire world, but it’s transparently obvious that these royalty fee differences serve as a barrier to entry designed to keep the Clear Channels of the country dominant over whatever broadcast media they choose.  Rest assured that whenever media conglomerates decide they want to make significant investments in Internet radio stations of their own, royalty fees will disappear as if by magic.  The combination of conglomerates’ business interests with the continual technology retardation of the RIAA and its member companies will no doubt be lethal to Internet radio eventually, if not right now.  And that’s a major problem for people like us who want to discover music by other means than those forced upon us by the biggest corporate dog in the backyard.

I’ve mentioned this before and I will say it again; in as much as the next revolution in music already exists, it is being driven by artists and listeners who are using alternative methods to find each other.  The RIAA’s insistence on applying 1970s thinking to electronic distribution of music continues to choke that distribution with DRM, licensing fees, and nonsensical limitations.  Mistakes like these drive isteners to say “Fuck it!” and hit BitTorrent while they drive artists to say “Fuck it!” and distribute music themselves.  Look at Radiohead, who released last year’s excellent In Rainbows themselves.  They separated from their record company, EMI, at the end of their contract, recorded the album themselves and thus owned the master, distributed it through their web site as a download priced at whatever the consumer was comfortable paying, including nothing, and finally licensed it themselves to a record label for distribution of CDs.  Quoting from this excellent interview with Thom Yorke and David Byrne, In Rainbows brought them $3 million in download payments.  This type of DIY distribution has to be the future of revolutionary music since traditional channels just aren’t going to push a broad range of material with full force.  So, what the mainstream is left with is generic-ass, easily promotable and just-as-easily forgettable music like the American Idol du jour or whatever steaming-hot piece of shit Nickelback has dropped like a chemical bomb on the unsuspecting public.  It’s a never-ending cycle of sign artist, pre-package with generic “singles” (hi there Katy Perry, why don’t you kiss deez), sell million albums, disappear artist, rinse, repeat.

With this slavish attachment to the bottom line, record companies switched from selling music to selling albums and along came a slew of stupid-ass technology-related decisions, like DRM, an awful idea which cripples the product they sell at the consumer’s expense.  I can’t say whether people share more MP3s than they dubbed cassettes a generation ago, and I’m not even arguing against the fact that artists deserve to be payed for their output, but I am saying that stupid-ass corporations are kneecapping their customers and themselves by refusing to acknowledge technology’s impact on their business.  File sharing isn’t going to go away, no matter how many file format changes or lawsuits they dream up, but they haven’t yet realized that and shitty practices like DRM and influence peddling to drive up royalty fees are slowly killing the music business.  While I admit that I’m particular about what I listen to, I’m really not trying to assault the average person’s musical taste, whatever that is.  All I want is a reliable method to find the music I’m interested in outside the mainstream.  I think it’s possible for a business to make money by providing that method, but the wet dream hasn’t yet been dreamt that a corporation couldn’t fuck up, so I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them.  In fact, if their lack of understanding keeps them stomping around like a big fat fucking retarded elephant in every creative endeavor’s room, I say let them all fall into the black hole of bankruptcy.  Computers scary!!!

On a related and more hopeful note, Last.fm doesn’t seem to have been as hard hit by royalty fees as Pandora, and it’s more or less replaced Pandora for me.  Maybe it can do the same for you, so if you’ve never tried it, give it a shot.  While it doesn’t have the technological cool of music genotyping that Pandora has, it accomplishes a lot by examing a social network of music lovers.  After you’ve listened to some things and it knows what you like, it can recommend new artists by the similarity of your tastes to other users’ tastes.  Check out my Last.fm user page if you like:

http://www.last.fm/user/JJRules

Don’t worry, I’ll get back to talking about music after this, no more economics bullshit.  Probably, anyway.  Also, if you want to read more opinionating about the suckiness of DRM, check out BoingBoing or Google “Cory Doctorow DRM.”  There’s a lot more anti-DRM content out there too, including Defective by Design, but I like BoingBoing and Cory a lot and it’s a great daily read anyway.

Also, and this is a shameless self-promotion, if you’re crazy enough to want to read more of my often-pointless non-music ramblings you can check out my regular (and infrequently updated) blog Writeration.