I have noted in the past that the greed of certain license have been having a decidedly negative impact on the cost of digital music and the availability of internet based music services such as Pandora. It would seem that PRS, the group responsible for collecting and distributing royalties from online services have seen a bit of light on the subject. They have veritably slashed the cost per stream to service providers from 0.22p to 0.085p.
After their recent dispute with YouTube over royalty payments for music streams and YouTubes subsequent decision to pull all music videos from the site rather than continue to run at a loss, PRS have evidently decided a smaller slice of the pie is better than no pie at all. And honestly, their demands on YouTube were ludicrously farcical - demanding enormous royalties of a site which effectively offers them free video hosting and the exposure such a high profile site can potentially generate effectively forcing the site to run at a loss is beyond idiocy on the part of PRS - how they thought they could maintain the old rate is beyond me.
My hope is that this development will allow Pandora to reopen its site to the UK market, and that they haven't deleted my account, which they probably have :(. This move could also result in cheaper premium services from providers like Spotify and Last.fm or mean that the free versions of these services require less advertising to support their provision. It may also make more funding available for the likes of Spotify to expand their libraries of available tracks.
All in all only good can come of this - Greed, it's a bad thing kids, don't for get that.
freedoms_stain, out.
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