A few years ago I wrote a post about what music labels could learn from the app store model (http://bijansabet.com/post/272385429/).
Unfortunately it’s as hard as ever for startup to get licensed. Thats not good for anyone.
We need a way for artists to get paid and for consumers to get smooth and easy access
Last week I had lunch with my friend Anthony (twitter.com/fascinated) who is the creator of the Hype Machine (http://hypem.com).
I mentioned that as much as I love rdio and spotify, the idea of sharing links to songs from those paid services to Twitter was the functional equivalent of tweeting a link to a news story sitting behind a pay wall. That’s a poor user experience and as a result i never tweet a link to a story behind a paywall. And I don’t tweet a song that sits behind a pay wall either.
This morning Fred wrote about the NYT’s porous pay wall (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/08/on-porous-paywalls.html). That’s a fantastic model. Easy for casual visitors but payment is required for active users.
I’d love to see music labels adopt a porous wall as well. It would increase shared links to music and I bet it would increase subscriptions too.
Update 5:24pm: a number of folks have pointed out by email and Twitter (eg https://twitter.com/pegobry/status/102831734369959936) that spotify is porous because of their ad model. I think it’s a nice start but porous in my mind means they should get rid of the desktop app requirement, lose registration requirement and work on all platforms.
(please excuse typos and lack of links. wrote this in my iPad).