The all-encompassing quandary of advertising in exchange for music
Ever since the broken and corrupt pop music industry was spiritually torn apart by the onslaught of piracy at the turn of the century, a new “solution” for the concern of artists getting paid for their work has appeared exactly every seven seconds. This wouldn’t be a problem so much if the advent of blogging hadn’t incurred, rendering would-be journalists into benign conduits of overtly enthusiastic information. Because of this, every new idea in regards to halting piracy gets heralded by someone, somewhere, as the future of the industry and the immediate end to all our woes.
(Who’s woes exactly?)
I heard about Tunesquare the other day, and while it certainly holds no promise of ever gaining ground, it at least prompts a moment to ascertain the situation that has allowed it to germinate. Tunesquare seems to believe that Times Square would be a nice motif for a website, so it is adorned with dozens of unrelated ads in a way that makes it look like a street tunneling through the internet. It’s tag line is initially enticing – absolutely free music for streaming, embedding and downloading (DRM-free) that actually pays the artists who decide to upload their material.
Where this breaks apart is in the ads themselves, and the philosophy that drives them: people aren’t paying for music, but maybe they’ll sustain an onslaught of corporate advertising in order to get it for free (which they are already doing). Tunesquare certainly isn’t the first website to think that this is a pretty good business model: AOL, Yahoo, and various other websites remind you of new flavours of Doritos while allowing you to access mp3s. At least those sites offer bona fide stars to tag along with the corporate candy.
Tunesquare’s got the same business model as every other post-Napster “solution”: if customers won’t pay for music, how else can we make money? It’s not an ignoble question, but the only way this industry will ever be fixed (if it’s in fact broken–it naturally requires a certain point of view to go in either direction) is if something comes along that astonishes and omits the very point of piracy. This, as opposed to revenue quandaries like the one Timesquare seeks to answer, is a substantially more difficult question.
