A good month for Music 2.0
A month ago, it was a pretty miserable time for Music 2.0. The Copyright Royalty Board had decided to raise fees on internet radio, threatening to put all of our favorite online music providers from Radio Paradise to Pandora out of business. But Online music received a stay of execution unto July 15th, while the RIAA tried to figure out the best way to decapitate the future of music. So the month of May started out pretty bleak for digital music - but since then all sorts of really good things have happened:
- Amazon announced that they were going to (for real this time) open a digital music store to compete with iTunes (remember, competition is good, split infinitives are bad)
- Bills have been introduced to Congress to
nullify the CRB decision (Tim Westergren of Pandora has been leading the
fight, Thanks Tim)
- Apple started selling DRM free tracks on iTunes (lets ignore the fact that Apple is embedding your email address in the 'DRM-Free' tracks for now.)
- Pandora announced its new Pandora on-the-go products - moving internet radio onto portable devices and into the living room
- MusicBranz started running there database on a Sun server. W00t!
- Slacker received VC funding of $40 million (!)
- CBS Buys Last.FM for $280 Million!!!!!!! (one '!' is worth $40 million nowadays)
- All the cool Music 2.0 people have a party on Facebook
- Net, Blogs and Rock and Roll gets a cover.
- A million Facebookers start using the iLike plug-in, MOG has trouble keeping up with all of their new Facebook members
- The Apple iPhone gets a release date
- Pandora, Last.FM and Slacker get good mentions in the main stream press.
That's a whole lotta good stuff happening. I think we really are at some magic tipping point here. Soon it will be a normal thing for casual music listeners to use a music recommender-driven internet radio. It's starting to happen now! So stop playing Desktop Tower Defense and start coding the next killer Facebook music app.