{"id":1483,"date":"2007-06-26T10:39:27","date_gmt":"2007-06-26T14:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/06\/26\/lastfms-non-silence-speaks-volumes\/"},"modified":"2007-06-26T10:39:27","modified_gmt":"2007-06-26T14:39:27","slug":"lastfms-non-silence-speaks-volumes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/06\/26\/lastfms-non-silence-speaks-volumes\/","title":{"rendered":"Last.fm’s non-silence speaks volumes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although I hate to jump on the whole “Day The Music Died” thing — which I think is a little over the top — I find it interesting that while a whole bunch of Web radio companies, including Yahoo Music and Pandora<\/a>, are turning off their streams in order to protest the increase in licensing fees for Web broadcasting, Last.fm has decided not to<\/a>, which has caused some consternation in the blogosphere, including this post<\/a> at TechCrunch by Duncan Riley.<\/p>\n

snipshot_e47fptthesl.jpgRiley says that the Last.fm decision could risk a backlash from users, and in a follow-up post at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington raises the issue<\/a> of whether the company’s decision has something to do with it having become part of CBS, the media conglomerate that bought it<\/a> for $280-million not too long ago. Last.fm, in a blog post in its defence<\/a>, says: “We do not want to punish our listeners for our problems, period.”<\/em> The company argues that royalty rates are a fact of life, and that because it is based in the UK it has had to deal with them for a long time, etc. It says the industry should fight for fairness, but that turning off Internet radio even for a day “is just plain wrong.”<\/em><\/p>\n

While the idea that users should come first is an appealing one — and companies like craigslist.org have certainly prospered by making it a mantra — Last.fm’s argument seems a little disingenuous. If the doubling of radio royalty rates takes effect (Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries has a nice overview<\/a> of the issues, as does the SaveNetRadio site<\/a>), small streaming companies could go under. That would obviously leave Last.fm in a pretty sweet position.<\/p>\n

I’m not saying that’s why Last.fm made the decision it did. I don’t know the company or the founders, so I can’t judge. I’m just saying it looks kind of fishy — especially when Yahoo<\/a> and RealNetworks and others have joined the protest. Turning off the stream for a single day doesn’t seem like a huge issue to make a point, and I would bet that Last.fm’s users would probably support the move.<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, Pandora has been inaccessible to Canadians for more than a month, after the company turned off access<\/a> to Canadian IP addresses because it couldn’t afford to reach licensing deals with all the record labels for Canada as well as the U.S.)<\/p>\n

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Although I hate to jump on the whole “Day The Music Died” thing — which I think is a little over the top — I find it interesting that while a whole bunch of Web radio companies, including Yahoo Music and Pandora, are turning off their streams in order to protest the increase in licensing … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Last.fm’s non-silence speaks volumes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}