JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Mentor Questions Forum Newsweek Interview with Michael Laskow

Ed,
Sadly you've missed the economics of the model. Take a deep breath, get the huge chip off your shoulder (you seem very angry) and do the math. A penny a play times 10,000,000 is quite a bit MORE than the value of one downloaded track. His entire point was that you get X number of new tracks each day automatically in your genre of choice. The 10,000,000 number was considered reasonable by Newsweek (and many others in the industry who have scrutinized his model). Once you've been the "pick" of the day on the automatic downloads, the listener will chose those songs they are most interested in to be added to their playlist. If 1% of the listeners do that, that's another 100,000 pennies each time that collection of folks interested in the track plays your song on their personal playlist. That's 1K a month for each time they listen as a group.. if you're in rotation on their playlist, you could easily get played 10 times a month or more. That's 10K a month at a penny per play. Not a bad living, and based on the very real numbers, it's not an unachievable goal for an indie artist who gets on the right filtered playlists.

The numbers could be significantly higher for those tracks people really love. In those cases, what if 10% or 20% add it to their regular playlist? That's some serious cash for everyone involved. And it still only costs the listener the same monthly subscription fee.

I am not sure what your level of animosity on this issue is all about. The ideas Laskow has put out have actually been bantered around for a LONG time by a lot of people, including us. (I've written several different editorials predicting this going back to 1998.) Everyone agrees that it's what is going to happen. Laskows real contribution was to suggest a way for major labels to stay in the game, and because of that, allow the technology and licensing to move forward much faster. Right now the heads of the remaining major labels are stalling technology and licensing for self interests. If there's a model that will allow them to survive and continue to participate, there's a better chance they'll stop blocking progress. iTunes broke a several year logjam overnight when they launched with the obvious model that people had been begging for a long time. Because it took so long to launch individual downloads for a fair price, other technology has been catching up to make that process nearly out of date already. Get with the times my friend. And don't blame the messenger for spreading a message that most enlightened people realize is a VERY good thing for ALL artists of any type.

Brian