A nova 'revolução' dos sites de musica online

«There's a new music revolution brewing, and it's social. Social music sites Imeem and Last.fm — which offer on-demand, ad-supported free music — have grown rapidly to 20 million monthly users each. Their success has the music industry seriously exploring the viability of ad-supported, free music as the next big business model for online music. (...) The latest trend is ad-supported, on-demand online music streaming, most notably, Imeem and Last.fm.  The old negative for such Web-only services — that you can listen to a song, but can't download it — no longer appears to be an issue. In the age of always-on, high-speed connections, "Who cares?" says Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, which bought Last.fm for $280 million in 2007.

Imeem and Last.fm are positioned as music communities, where friends tell each other about what songs and artists they like. Since the sites have licensing agreements with the four major labels, fans can share songs and playlists with each other. Last.fm restricts users to listening to a song just three times, while Imeem has no restrictions. Both services are online radio stations, but they are different from competitors Pandora or Slacker, which create personalized stations based on your musical tastes. Here, you pick the songs and the artists, or choose music based on recommendations from peers. "Friends pay a lot more attention to what their peers say than music reviewers," says Mike McGuire, an analyst with Gartner.  The sites also differ from social networks like MySpace and Facebook in that "our audience isn't looking for dates," says Steve Jang, Imeem's chief marketing officer.» (fonte: «Music websites are fighting to be free, 5/02/08, USA Today)

«There’s now a bevy of free, ad-supported music services emerging, including CBS' Last.fm, Spiralfrog, imeem and Qtrax. The message to consumers is clear: Music is an add-on; it has no retail value of its own. With each new service, the $0 price point is reinforced and music becomes swag – like logo embossed ballpoint pens or branded refrigerator magnets.   

Maybe this evolution is natural – after all, it’s often been pointed out that recorded music has a zero marginal cost to produce (meaning that every additional MP3 produced by a record label costs no more than the original recorded track.)  Proof of exactly how cheap it is to produce music is the billion MP3 files each month that are created via P2P sites, mostly illegal.  How can consumers really be expected to pay $1 for a product they know costs nothing to produce?» (The Brooding Savage, 7/02/08)