"Pulling the Plug" on Pandora?

"70 percent of the music in the Pandora collection comes from artists who are not on a label." Tim Westergren

Tim Westergren

"'We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,' said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. 'This is like a last stand for webcasting.'"

"The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet. The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions."

"Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies."

"Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures. As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits."

High-Quality TV Meets the Long Tail

Will niche TV programming on the Internet disintermediate traditional cable?

Jim Louderback

We met Jim at the mediabistro Circus, where he participated in a panel discussion with Dina Kaplan from blip.tv and Robert Scoble, Managing director of Fast Company TV. Here's the discription from the mediabistro Circus program: "Online video is one of the most powerful tools that can be used to tell a story, build a brand and engage an audience; but producing an effective video is more than a camera and an editing program. Guest speakers in this session will discuss where the future of internet video is headed, why including video into your strategy makes sense and the very different ways to make the most of this technology platform."

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