Warner to quit free music streaming

Just posted a journal about this - (link here) - which I'll add to this thread...

Writing this on the back of the BBC article I just read; Warner to quit free music streaming - another major label pulling out of web.2 because it's "clearly not positive for the industry"...

How does a label measure this? I would guess that the best measurement would be that of cold hard cash. You'll have to factor in other non-cash elements and work out potential cash value from them. And there's the rub.

Easy things to measure are;

• how many songs from the Warner catalogue have been played on last.fm (or spotify or etc etc etc)?
  
• how much money back from these plays has been paid?
  
• How many indivual users have listened to these tracks?
  

Easy to measure because last.fm will send all this info to Warners.

What I'm not so sure is easy to measure is what listens are converted into sales. By this I mean a user listens to tracks by an artist and then buys those tracks, an album by that artist, goes to a gig, etc.
Last.fm provides links to ebay/amazon/other from artist & album & track pages and is pushing this further by their new homepage (subscribers only at the mo) - see http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/598190 for more on that - but can an actual sale online be clearly linked to following links from last.fm and listening to the tracks on last.fm? And what about non-online sales.

A few years back last.fm became my mainline into hearing dubstep tracks and I never looked back. I have spent an unseemly amount on vinyl since this but how does any label know why I bought all that stuff? Maybe I would have gone elsewhere to first hear the music - but I didn't.
I've bought LPs after hearing about them via last.fm and sometimes I've emailed the record label (very indie small labels here!) to say I bought this after hearing something on last.fm and seeing the link to buy it on the artist pages. (did this for LP from Charlottefield from Unsound label.

I think firstly that Warners might be missing a trick here, but secondly that major labels are not all that web.2 friendly due to their size and distance from the end users (that'd be you and me).

Can the majors survive without these technologies? Probably.
Can last.fm survive without buy in from the majors? No Idea. What % of tracks come from them?

The future may depend upon finding a way to measure these unknowns. But how you join up all your music purchases with your online presence and web.2 behavior is a bit beyond my ken! I'm guessing some sort of invasion of personal liberty/data?

I'll wait to see what happens with this one, it could just be all talk. Also, it's a bit vague at the moment; if they're quitting "free music streaming", does that mean that Spotify's paid subscribers will still have access to the Warner catalogue? Because if so, that's fine by me - hell, it'd probably drive a whole lot of new subscribers for Spotify.

If, however, they're exiting the online streaming market altogether, that's a huuuuge mistake. Someone in a boardroom clearly thinks "if people can't listen for free, they'll buy the CD instead". No, they'll trend towards downloading it illegally instead - at which point, even if they like it, it's very hard to motivate them towards paying for a CD of the album they've already downloaded.

It's definitely going to get ugly though.

im gonna throw in this:

Warner sucks.

No, major labels suck. You expect change from them and this is what is seen..not budging because they want every penny for themselves.

StudleyUK said:
Someone in a boardroom clearly thinks "if people can't listen for free, they'll buy the CD instead". No, they'll trend towards downloading it illegally instead

Or they'll just never hear it in the first damn place.

Warner's business model might as well be built around buggy whips and butter churns.

Warners have shot themselves in the foot here. The streaming offers a chance to preview before you buy. People will start illegally downloading the artists to preview it and because they already have it, they won't go out and buy it.

And smaller artists won't be discovered as much through streaming sites which hurts both Warners and the artist

TalkingToPylons said:
Hmm I wouldn't be surprised if being a Subscriber on either or both Last.fm and Spotify will mean this doesn't effect you. It just won't be available for free to anyone.

Hmmm...hadn't considered this... If I read your post correctly, you are suggesting that Warner will ask last.fm to exclude its catalog for free members, but that the entire Warner catalog might still be available to last.fm subscribers, right?

Oldbean said:
Frankly, I'm not sure what if any purpose they serve in this day in age

Hmmm, well, giving bands who do not want to get involved with PR (<<shudder>>, and who does) and distribution, and providing money up front for stuff and already knowing how to book gigs in the right places, distribution, etc etc etc.

Some bands and artists have these powers (or don't need them) but other bands and artists need other people behind them with all this knowledge and experience I guess. Charlotte Hatherley (ex of Ash) is an example of someone who tried the whole DIY experience and got stung by it. Not all musicians like dealing with that side of things!

Come on people, Web POWER!
Email Warner's & tell them you won't buy any of their products (music, film ,games,whatever) if they act on this. Also tell them which albums you've bought after hearing them on LastFM, Spitify whatever....
Go to it kids....

Mamaatti said:
dankine said:
doesn't look too good, for those of you that listen to warner bands.

Oh no. Now I need to illegally download REM from the internet :P

lol

Spotify tweeted about this when the news broke, WM will not be pulling any content from Spotify - at least this is what they are leading us to believe.

you can see the tweet here: http://twitter.com/Spotify/status/8919825963