
Your Guide to Music on the Web, Part II - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/26/your-guide-to-music-on-the-web-part-ii/
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ABrandt
The author's bleak conclusion on music's future on the web is an interesting
one. As popular as this media is, it really does seem to be in trouble with a
lack of innovation and huge legal barriers.

With a vast majority of sites simply scraping copyrighted work from YouTube,
the RIAA essentially has this industry in its pocket (a massive take-down
campaign could crush these startups).

The only real solution I see is a complete rebuilding of the industry. It will
take time but bands can be weened off of the whole "million dollar contract"
thing--just like us Entrepreneurs are breaking away from traditional VC
models.

~~~
jrwoodruff
I was just wondering this the other day. Back in '99 or 2000 it felt like a
music revolution was in full swing. Music labels were ignoring p2p and
everyone was downloading.

Now, it all seems stale. I love Pandora and similar services, but they've
hardly broken open the doors of the music label oligopoly. I

It seems the ridiculous lawsuits is working. And artists are still more than
eager to give their music away on mySpace, etc.

Where's the future of music?

~~~
daleharvey
spotify

I dont think much more needs to be done if spotify keep up what they are doing
so far.

~~~
siong1987
I am in US right now. That's why I have no access to Spotify. I believe that
majority of the users here are interested in using Spotify but have no idea
what it is.

Could you be more specific on what makes Spotify so unique? I heard that it is
just another subscription based music player like Rhapsody but with better UI.
Correct me if I am wrong.

~~~
daleharvey
not being in the us I dont know what rhapsody does, but :)

the desktop client is free to use in an unlimited way, there are adverts but
they are pretty unintrusive.

they have a pretty massive library, at first there was a few holes but they
are getting better and better.

their player interface is pretty decent, but their software rocks, I can
search and start playing a song faster than I can with itunes playing local
songs, if it goes offline, they have usually cached most of my popular
playlists, I can have svn timing out and somehow this thing still plays new
songs.

along with a mobile application that lets you store offline playlists.

from wikipedia it sounds like rhapsody is a pretty similar service, and if so
I dont really understand what more people can want as a music consumer, its a
pretty damn big step compared to just a few years ago

~~~
jrwoodruff
As far as music being available, I think it's a decent option, but it's still
beholden (as far as I know) to the music label oligopoly.

I'd like to see something that gives the music labels a run for their money,
doesn't require artists to sign away all their rights in return for sales and
makes sense for all players in the business, not just the big-money interests.

~~~
daleharvey
with services like cdbaby (who are signed on to spotify), independent artists
can get pretty direct access to consumers, its only one separation from
artists directly controlling their own distribution.

to be fair its been like that for a while with cdbaby and itunes, lets hope we
start seeing a larger throughput of artists "go it alone" now that this is all
in place, or maybe we were wrong about the labels (and the artists) all along.

