On Aug 18, 2008, at 6:06 PM, Jared Spool wrote:
Eventually, a new model will spring forth (probably one where individual artists circumvent the labels and their control structure) and the music will find its way to the consumer.
Absolutely. In fact, there are already several fantastic services very much like what you're suggesting, allowing musicians to distribute their music directly to consumers and get fairly paid for it. For now they go through the major online music stores for downloading tracks (iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Emusic, etc) rather than directly to consumers via streaming media players.
An example of this service is http://www.tunecore.com -- you sign up, pay a very small fee, and then create a band profile and upload your tracks. Tunecore then creates an artist page for you in each of the online music stores and puts your songs in the stores' catalogs for people to buy and download. You simply watch the money roll in directly to your account. You're paying for the service alone, never relinquishing per-song royalty percentages, and the costs are miniscule (we're talking under $20-30 *total* to get your album up).
If any of the major retailers were to offer a streaming service, then Jared your model would reach fruition. Pandora, I imagine, is looking at options to sell their entire technology to Apple or Emusic so it can be integrated into a normal store as a new feature.
On Aug 18, 2008, at 8:31 PM, Jarod Tang wrote:
Another example of well designed objects be killed by rights. As the founder said, the business model is broken by the rights/changes promotion.
This is something we UX designers often forget: That great products are both killed *and* born out of purely business dealmaking, regardless of the UX. It's sad to watch a business deal fall apart and kill a great product like Pandora, but we have to remember that it was a business deal that enabled the product to exist in the first place. For example, as great as iTunes may be as a user experience, its success has as much to do with Apple's ability to secure profitable deals with the record labels as it does with the UX. Without those advantageous deals (deals that, if I recall correctly, were markedly better than many other music stores were able to negotiate), the UX couldn't exist.
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