 |
 |
Assuming the Spotify (and Pandora) business models can survive -- I think both have lost gobs of money so far, but so has Amazon and it's a darling of the media and Wall Street -- it is the largest threat to FM and satellite radio. The record companies have already carved out royalty agreements with both services, and I would bet that listening to streaming choice-driven on-demand music leads to some music purchases. It definitely does that for me, Pandora has directly led me to several somewhat obscure modern funk-revival players, just as one example. I always thought satellite radio was dumb, and having a year trial in a new GM vehicle proved the point to me. It's no better than mediocre FM, and why pay for it if you have a decently-loaded iPod? AM radio will survive with talk-casting. FM is an interesting thing. Some of the stations have been gotten for chump chainge (not by the big chains, which are likely never to see a good return on ridicu-prices paid in the 90s), and can easily be programmed up with syndicated talk stuff or whatever off-the-shelf filler the owner wants to string between commercials. Enough people will listen to it as background that local advertisers will get a return on their investment. A few "craft brew" FM stations will always survive, often affiliated with college campuses and carrying a lot of pre-made content from NPR. Now that you don't have to have a Facebook account to sign in to Spotify, and now that you don't have to pay to use it, I plan to try it. Pandora's problem is too limited a selection of music for all-day listening, and you can't reject enough bad choices per hour. However, my hat is off to Pandora for coming up with some very clever audio-transmission technology and providing decent sound quality (better than satellite radio for sure) over a relatively narrow pipe. I am curious to see if Spotify has been equally clever. By the way, perhaps of greater interest to ARSC than elsewhere, I've found Pandora to be very well-stocked with older music. I have my own "Fletcher Henderson Channel" which I strictly sculpt to non-Swing hot jazz and early big band (usually ends up pre-1940, but they have lots of late-40's hot jazz revival material in rotation too). They seem to be adding content because I can listen to that station a long time before it repeats something. -- Tom Fine ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Hirsch" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Friday, December 13, 2013 1:12 AM Subject: [ARSCLIST] Provocative article on the future of music delivery > This turned up on one of the other lists I subscribe to. In some ways it > strikes me as totally irrelevant to what most of us are involved with, at > least as far as our role as custodians of the history of recorded sound > entails. On the other hand, we live in the present which is always shifting > towards the future. As alien as this future strikes me (and possibly some > of you reading this piece about it), I can't say that I can deny the truth > of its existence. > > http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/spotify-s-mobile-shift-shows-fate-music-industry/245651/ > > Peter Hirsch > >