
Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business - prakash
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/something-impor.html
======
henning
I'm really getting tired of all these pundits who have a magic crystal ball.

Services can stay irrationally bad for a very long time. He's making
ridiculous speculations about the spread of broadband over the entirety of the
United States without even considering why the USA doesn't _already_ have the
kind of bandwidth Europe and Japan have.

Just because there's a potential for something to occur doesn't mean it will
happen. Do you remember microformats? People like Jakob Nielsen had chubbies
for that crap for years. It never materialized even though it kind of seems
like a good idea.

Just because you throw money at people for a living doesn't mean you know what
the fuck you're doing.

------
lg
A grad student I know said he might work at his friends' very secret startup
this summer. All he said is that it'll revolutionize the music business, it
has the full support of several record companies, they got half a million from
vc's just for the idea, and apparently radiohead is tangentially involved. I
don't know if it's good or bad to have so many cooks in the kitchen before
they've written a single line of code... but anyway, maybe it's something like
fred's talking about.

------
as
"Everyone of my generation has had their favorite radio stations. Everyone of
my kid’s generation will have their favorite web music services. There will be
hundreds of them."

Why would there be hundreds of them? Unlike radio stations, web streaming
services aren't limited to one song at a time. With network effects it seems a
few services would dominate.

(Otherwise a good article. I'm typing this while listening to thefeelgood.com)

~~~
ardit33
There can be many successful online radio sites, catering to different tastes.
I never use one and only one. Sometimes I use pandora, sometimes musicovery,
sometimes somafm, sometimes imported digital. Depends on my mood, and what I
am looking for.

~~~
omouse
But that's an artificial distinction. There's no stopping somafm or imported
digital from hosting other types of music (other than servers).

------
a-priori
What's to stop Apple from adopting this business model? They already have the
music database, and the streaming capability (for song previews).

I'm not commenting on the value of this business model, just that the article
seems to imply that Apple will be left in the dust when the music industry
goes this way.

------
ardit33
"These services are coming to mobile phones, probably in the next year we’ll
all be listening to pandora or last.fm in the gym on our phone instead of our
limited library on our iPod."

This is already here. You can get XM Radio, MobiRadio on ATT and Sprint
phones, and Pandora (on Sprint only so far), and there are many services
(verizon has it's own streaming music).

------
willz
The article amounts to saying one thing, streaming is getting popular.

But so what? People will still buy a house even if they can also rent it.
Renting and owning will always coexist.

Also, if streaming gets popular, then a million people will be doing it. So,
instead of putting up a mp3 for download, now people will use some streaming
service to stream it. What do the label companies get? They have the same
piracy and control issue like before.

