Small Fish, Big Pond

Since I love music and I love tech it seems that it would be the perfect story, but if the last.fm plugins on the left of the page or my moderator status at last.fm didn’t clue you in I’m not exactly a user of Pandora.

Backstory: At the behest of the fatcats that control music the government began enforcing new royalty laws that significantly raised the price of internet music streaming in the US. The rates were much higher than previously and many US internet radio stations feared they wouldn’t be able to stay afloat so they protested by taking themselves off the air, akin to “You can’t fire me. I QUIT!” Last.fm was criticized for not participating but as they said, they had been paying higher fees all along since they were dealing with global distribution. i.e. We’ve been paying this much all along and we’re alright, suck it up now that you have to play by the taught rules we had to play by.

The protest of course was useless and it seemed that US internet radio was doomed (or at least the heydays of cheap royalties was gone). But now a deal has been cut with SoundExchange that will lower the fees. Hooray, but don’t be fooled, SoundExchange is still sitting pretty with this deal. It’s all pretty sick considering how arbitrary their method of “reimbursing” their artists is. My friend was an independent musician with one limited CD release but never sees a dime.

SoundExchange divies up their royalties by percentage; polling radios (and any other transmission format) on what they played and figuring out who gets what based on who was played the most. So if I play my friends music 24/7 on my radio but play all Metallica on the day that SoundEx polls my listening, Metallica gets 100% of the royalties. Considering how draconian SoundEx is on collecting royalties this kind of inaccuracy is absurd in the age of computers where you can track music plays in real time.

The point is internet radio shouldn’t be adjusting their business models to fit the modern industry, SoundExchange and there other music controllers need to update their business model to fit the new modern music industry.

Via TechCrunch and everywhere else on the techno-blogosphere.

Just something I have noticed since making my blog now vs when I was blogging back in 2004.

I wanted to add a widget from gdgt (add me if you have a profile!) and the widget page didn’t provide the code from the widgets, just ways to send it to various other sites.

In 2004 you quickly learn html and basic JavaScript because you’re always adding widgets and tools to your blog. Now a days everything is packaged up for you so you just have the widget sent to your blogging software so that it’s inserted automatically. Which is cool if you use one of the big commercial blog systems. But sucks if you’re hosting your own site like I am and you have to insert the code into the blog by hand like we did 5 years ago.

I’ve noticed this trend all across the web, things are made easier for you so you don’t have to have the technical expertise to setup all the cool various tricks. I guess the web isn’t just the domain of us tech geeks anymore.