Good move Spotify - is streaming music the future?
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in streaming, Spotify, music on
I’ve already written on the joys of Spotify, and its been going from strength to strength recently - hitting a million users - although its still has its troubles.
However, news and features editor Nicole Kobie asked the question on how Spotify was going to make money, and it seems to have hit upon what I think is a pretty intelligent idea.
According to a report in the Telegraph, it intends to give a near CD quality sound upgrade for users who are willing to pay for its premium service.
This seems like a good move. It doesn’t leave existing users of Spotify listening to it for free short-changed, but it did provide an avenue for it to make some money out of a service that I think some people would actually sign up for - which might mean a bigger and better catalogue.
It also came to my attention that Top 40 bosses were considering offering to incorporate songs from music streaming sites, which also made sense. The days of free content on the internet may now be with us.
For instance - I haven’t bought a CD or bothered to download music for ages now, simply because wherever I am - be that work or home - I can stream all the music I need. And although it may not be of CD quality - its fine for my purposes.
It’s maybe funny and sad that one of the sites that popularised music streaming from band websites in MySpace, is completely going down the other direction as it loses traffic as well as workforce.
However as I said in March - there are ten very good reasons why Rupert Murdoch’s little baby is going down the drain.
Can YouTube run decent music videos again?
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in streaming, MTV, music videos, Youtube on
YouTube used to be very useful and great fun. The fact that I could watch any music video that anybody decided to upload was fantastic - as well as listen to a few 80’s classics I could find out about a few bands I’d never heard before as they were related to the ones I had listened to.
However, it became slightly lame in March when it couldn’t come to agreement with PRS for Music about putting on premium music videos for the right place. After that there was little point in watching YouTube for music videos when many of the classic artists I was listening to simply weren’t there.
However, it seems that after consultation with stakeholders, independent music publishers and the wider industry, digital streaming sites will have to pay 0.085p per video, a reduction from 0.22p, which seems like a particularly large cut.
Hopefully this will be acceptable to sites such as YouTube. It’s been the time, for quite a while already, that people have rejected traditional music video avenues like MTV in favour of this type of streaming on demand.
It makes sense. For me personally its great that I don’t have to sit through crappy DJs, crappy shows and can get straight to the music I want. And considering I don’t have a TV, its the only way to watch cool music vids rather than the fluff they normally show.
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