Well artist, first of all, I don't think it's about competing, if you could compete you wouldn't need the pay per play model to begin with, secondly there are many other avenues of getting your songs out there that are absolutely free, so why go that route?

There are literally hundreds of music sites, with thousands of listeners, where I can place music for free. It doesn't cost me a dime.

Additionally, I have 3 or 4 hundred DJ's that are willing to play my music on the internet and Am/Fm stations through out the world. They don't charge me a dime.

I don't think anyone gets to this point not having been willing to pay anything, that's for sure. However, like a retirement plan, or any other long term investment, one has to choose how to invest from the many options that exist. I just don't believe your scenario is the best possible route to pursue that's all.

What makes you believe that if the pay per use thing didn't work when applying it to the listener it's going to be anymore successful when applying it to the songwriters, or artists? Especially when there are a heck of a lot more listeners than artists.

Last but not least before you invest foolishly you should do some research. Let me tell you what I know for a fact about Jango.

Jango is rated by alexa at about a 2700 ranking. Their percentage of traffic of all internet users is shown to be 0.044% not even 1%. Other site linking to them number 998, not what I would consider a major player in their market. Many other sites, ranks much higher. 42% of their visitors come from within the United States, outside the U.S. their largest consumers are China, Russia, Japan, and Brazil. I might note that 3 of those 4 countries are known to have the highest piracy issues in the world, Thought that was kind of intersting.

The average user of jango spends about 3.2 minutes per visit, hardly enough time to listen to much music.

I think the other thing you have to understand are the demographics of jango. The average user is a male, 21 years of age, most of whom have no college education, which indicates to me that they are in the lower 30% of income earners in the world, and probably not your best overall target group for selling music.

The results for lastfm.com are even worse, they reach less than 0.00005 % of all internet users, and don't even rank in the top 100,000 percentile when it comes to traffic of all sites similar. Average time spent at the site per visitor 0.3 minutes.
I bet they are sampling a lot of music on that site...lol.

Now compare them to www.soundclick.com which doesn't charge a play per song fee, their traffic ranking is 2742, they reach only 0.024% of all internet users but the average time spent by users on their site is 9.5 minutes per user, they have over 7,ooo other sites linking in to their site,and their average user is a male about 23 years of age, with a college education..hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...Why would you want to pay Jango or lastFm to play your music if no one is hearing it, and those that do probably aren't buying music anyways? Think I'll stick to the free sites, at least if no one is listening to them, it didn't cost me anything.

I hope that answers your questions about the pay per play issue.

Billy Darnell

http://www.billydarnell.com

http://www.songwriterservices.biz