antonybrydon

Pandora is out of control...

At EMusic in 1999, we often felt like our future was in the hands of the major record labels, who steadfastly refused to license their catalogs without draconian DRM and unaffordable licensing fees.

Ten years later, it's difficult to see Pandora in a similar situation, threatening to shut-down due to exorbitant royalty fees that are costing them $17m of their $25m in annual revenues:

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting." (from the Washington Post)

It's painful, because Pandora has built the best Walkman we've ever seen and delighted consumers worldwide.

And the award for creative business models goes to...

This article is dated (2004!), but extraordinary nonetheless. It describes a band that set up a travel agency around their touring to generate funds. It might not be as ludicrous as it sounds. I don't consider myself a rabid music fan, but in the last three years I've taken two trips to London to see Massive Attack, a trip to New York to see Jennifer Charles, and a trip to LA to see Bjork. All in, I probably spent $4,000 dollars on the travel, and a 10 percent commission fee would exceed all the money I've ever spent on their music. The experiment was likely a failure, but it's a great example of a band responding to evaporating business models and experimenting with new ones, rather than clinging to the vine (credit for the 'Tarzan' analogy to Jim Griffin) of old and dying business models: