Internet radio can be music shop, distribution and promotion, doesn't it?

[wishxy]

Turning internet radio into online music shop and distribution. Do you like idea and do you think it can be ultimate solution for changing hard situation in music?

 

[MikeRivers]

No

[veracohr]

I don't know about promotion, but it wouldn't be bad for people to be able to immediately buy a song they're hearing. Of course this really only benefits single sales.

[blue2blue]

Having a conversion point handy any time should theoretically help sales. They can't hit the buy-now button if there is no buy-now button. 

So, particularly for non-subscription streams that provide little or no direct revenue to the artist/label, it seems only sensible to at least demand that the purveyor (Pandora, Last.fm or whoever) make it as easy as possible for users to find the material in order to (hopefully) buy. 

I mention Last.fm because they do a particularly bad job of this. Not too long after Last.fm started I went there and found my music there. Next to the play links were buy buttons. The buy buttons went to iTunes. But, guess what? My music wasn't ON iTunes. And there was no way for me to update the link to show where it was on sale. Nice job, guys. (I think they've fixed it but I've since done what I could to remove my presence from Last.fm. I'm not offended by what they do. I'm offended by how badly they do it.)

 

Online radio of varous sorts works for many folks. And when I first heard about Pandora, I was definitely intrigued. It still sounds like a great idea. Only problem is, I run out of skips in the first half hour, most 'stations' I set up. And I LIKE hearing new, unfamiliar music -- as long as I, you know, like the music. Sadly, that just didn't seem to be the case, most of the time.  

But then I discovered on-demand subscription.

Despite the fact that, historically, a lot of folks can't seem to wrap their head around why they'd want to be able to pay ~$10 a month to be able to listen to (almost) anything, anytime on their desktop or on their phone, in relative hi fi (the US-based MOG uses all 320 kbps high quality streams; others like Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody offer a mix of lower rates with no promises), it seems that a new generation of consumers DOES get the concept and the industry seems finally to have stopped resisting the notion (for the most part) and is now looking at ways to maximize income from this 'new' purveyance venue. 

I've been using on-demand subscription streaming since ~2004 (I'm now on my fourth service, the aforementioned MOG) and, even in the early days, when selections were decidedly a bit sketchy, I saw it as a great deal that offered me instand access to both music I already owned (inconveniently and sometimes scratchily -- I prowled the used record stores) on vinyl as well as stuff I'd once owned (I once got ripped off for my ~300 most recently played records and brother it made a dent in both my then ~450 disc collection as well as my psyche) -- but, crucially, it gave me access to almost all of the new music I hadn't been buying during the post-net-boom (which hit me fairly hard for a number of reasons) as well as new stuff just coming out that was getting buzzed up.