Would You Pay To Read This?

There's a lot of talk within the journalism profession these days about how to get people to pay for content on the internet when almost all of it can be accessed for free.

Newspaper companies across the nation are quickly going broke as they sink financial resources into quality journalism and photography for their websites praying that they can sell enough advertising banners on their websites to pay for it all.

The problem is that they can't.

And with the economy dragging everyone down like a spider-web weighted with a rock, marketers have cut their marketing budgets, making the newspapers' bottom line look even more in the red than it was before.

Add to the newspapers' problem a little thing called Google.



Google likes to make everything accessible to everyone and doesn't play favorites when it comes to how it organizes its search engine results for something newsy like say, "Buffalo plane crash."

You type those words into Google search and the first result was a link to the China News, then the London Free Press, then several from Yahoo's news aggregator and THEN, at fifth place in line, the Los Angeles Times.

Google is the internet's great democratizer. Just because the New York Times may be the Old Gray Lady of journalism doesn't mean she's going to get in the front row.

So, when you think about it, Google plays fair. But that's not what the traditional newspapers have been used to for over a hundred years.

Not only are they taking a blow to their bottom line on the web, but now, the web, which is essentially "Google", let's face it, is deflating their egos at the same time (and making a crap load of money at it.)

And they're starting to get pissed.

Now they have an idea to start charging website visitors iTunes-like micropayments to view news articles (thus, the focus of a recent TIME Magazine cover story, seen above.)

Up until recently, there's been a number of venture capital-backed companies that have tried to get this idea off the ground but to no avail.

But now, internet financial processing software has come far enough where it could possibly work and make the pay-for-read experience for us consumers relatively easy to experience.

The idea would be to have you sign up on the newspaper or magazine's website with your credit/debit card information and as you moved around the web site and saw something you wanted to read, you would click on a "Purchase" button and the 99cent payment (called micropayments) would automatically be deducted from your account, just as it is on ITunes, Amazon or Snocap.

It sounds like it would work, right?

The problem, as with music, is that the majority of the public are used to getting this content for free so how are we going to train them to start paying for it (again?)

In all honesty, I'm really not too sure.

One theory is that if you just go and lock up all of your web content behind such a payment system, you may lose 50% of your regular website traffic, but the other 50% that would begin to pay for your content, piece-by-piece, would more than make up in revenue what you lost in advertising dollars because your web traffic declined.

It could work but it's risky and a lot of major companies don't like taking risks.

Like the American auto industry.




What's the rule in business?

If you don't risk, you die.

But, let's say that they could get us to start paying for articles and photographs and charts and such, what would it mean then for financially-successful, news-linking sites like the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and tons of blogs all over the internet?

They could get crushed.

Because they couldn't just link to a free article anymore. Nor, could they just copy and paste articles onto their own websites.

Or could they?

If newspapers and magazines try and lock up their content behind micropayments, wouldn't it just encourage people to "steal" the content and post if on their websites for free?

Would there have to be an RIAA for journalism organized to go after these pirate sites?

To sue them and take them to court for copyright-infringement?

Well, we know how well that has worked...

I dunno, you tell me what you think.

Is journalism worth paying for?

Or are old, romantic ideas of the career of a journalist gone forever?

Not Your Dad's Radio Anymore

There used to be a time when FM radio mattered to taking your band to the next level.

Your band could only get so big without having the major radio networks from coast-to-coast pushing your hits down the throats of listeners day in and out.

Lots of radio people were paid off to play music that never would have seen the light of day otherwise.

Alan Freed and Dick Clark got busted in the late 1950's for payola. Freed was a drunk with a big mouth and wasn't liked so they threw the book at him. Clark was squeaky clean because of American Bandstand and knew how to smooth feathers like a slick politician so he got off the hook essentially.

One died forgotten, the other ended up being our New Year's host in Times Square.

But when Shawn Fanning starting pushing for illegal downloading of music , the entire music industry collapsed, slowly but surely, dragging the concert industry and radio industry down with it. (There's a new book by Steve Knopper that goes into detail about this entire disaster- it's a must read if you're in a band or want to get into the music business.)



There have been a lot of mistakes that the music industry has made over the past 8 years when dealing with the downloading issue but the largest one currently messing their future up is in radioland.

FM radio doesn't matter anymore.

There i said it.

FM radio's power to break a band and make them huge was essentially killed by MySpace and YouTube.

We have moved from a society that wants things fed to us, to one that wants to seek them out.

When radio limited their playlists to only hits and eliminated local disc jockeys to save money and pay shareholders that never should have invested in the "arts" in the first place, they signed their death certificates.

Then satellite radio came along.

XM and Sirius Radio.

Both had their positives no doubt.

But all they've ended up becoming are the 8-track era of radio.

A transition.

Not because they suck at what they do or because of the recent merger.

Not even because their stock is practically junk at .13 cents a share.

It's because portable web radio is going to wipe it all out.

Yes, the Pandora model will ultimately be known as killing commercial radio in its current state.

It'll be the MySpace to Clear Channel's radio network.

Yes, Congress, the RIAA, the major radio network owners and the label-created and backed new media royalty collector SoundExchange have lobbied hard to make sure that the rates per song/per stream to play music on your own web radio station are so prohibitively high that only major companies could afford them, effectively wiping out independent web radio operators.

Even Pandora is still rumored to be closing shop due to the increased royalty payments that they've been stuck with despite their popularity as one of the top applications for the iPhone.

Regardless of the doom, in late December the following press release ended up in my email box:

Blaupunkt and miRoamer Unveil Internet Radio for the Car

By Eliot Van Buskirk December 31, 2008 2:55:06 PMCategories: Audio, Automotive, CES 2009
Blaupunkt and miRoamer will announce a partnership at CES that will put internet radio into car dashboards for the first time. Blaupunkt prototypes pictured here show the technology in action.

"miRoamer's development with Blaupunkt is the first seamless Internet radio solution," said miRoamer founder and CEO George Parthimos. "With the simple push of a button, users can access AM/FM stations or Internet radio's thousands of music, entertainment, news and talk stations from around the world, all from the same car stereo."

Here's what the little gizmo looks like:



So, give this little gadget idea a few years and our cars will come with web radio capability effectively wiping out FM radio's stranglehold on making music known once and for all.

How, how can that happen when I just pointed out above that royalty payments above are cost-prohibitive for anyone but the same large FM corporations to be able to afford?

Because I think the music industry is starting to wake up and realize that they have to start thinking creatively when it comes to working with the "underground", per se, and start to embrace them instead of suing them and over-charging them all the time into non-existence.

This is what I think the music industry should do:

1) Remember what the hell the word "promotion" meant.

"Promotion" in the label radio department meant "pay off Music Director 'A' in Buffalo to play the new Good Charlotte single." The same word in the publicity and A&R department meant to spread the band's name, image and music around to enough people to help them grow their audience and, hopefully, make everyone involved (including the artist, remember them?) to make some money. So, remember, having an entity want to "promote" your band doesn't mean they should have to pay for that right, necessarily. If you need to get paid for every single thing your artists do to promote themselves now in order to be able to pay your CEO's $20 million dollar a year salary, maybe tell the CEO to go work at a bank. They're making nice money now from the Feds, aren't they?

2) Get real about web royalty payments. Do you want only a few companies to determine the fate of your artists' careers? Do you only want the top 5 or 7 companies in the country to control who gets played on the web? It doesn't matter if it's Clear Channel or AOL- why should they be the only ones to be able to play music?

Why don't you ask your artists what they would prefer? The majority of artists don't think like Metallica, believe me.

Remember, college radio broke R.E.M., Nirvana and Soundgarden. Embracing the underground again actually helps your company because, more often than not, they'll know what artists are going to be big a long time before anyone at your label does. So embrace independent web radio and work to lower the royalty payments to realistic numbers. Oh, and don't whine about having to charge high pricing so you can pay the artists the money they deserve to sustain their careers. Most of these artists aren't getting paid squat from you after the initial advance as you're recouping all of those costs and expenses you refuse to disclose in any sensible accounting form unless the band sues you to get an adequate audit of said costs and expenses.

3) Go talk to some of the M.I.T. geniuses about building an platform that would allow independent web radio operators to have their radio stations set up on a model like the Virgin Mobile system- a pay-as-you-go model. Web radio operators would go to a music hub site, go through the music library (like disc jockeys used to do before their air shifts were planned out by some paid-off consultant in Chicago), click on the music they wanted to play and next to each song would be a blanket price per stream. Something reasonable, remember? The point is to expose music to people not hide it behind lawyers.

Each song would be tagged with a marker so that the number of times it was streamed on the web site by a listener could be tracked and counted and the fees for having that song played per listener could be calculated. The web radio operator's account with this music hub would be hooked into their paypal account and they could also set it up so that if they only wanted to spend so much money on music streams at one time, they could create a cap on their account so that only so many listeners could be allowed to be tuned into that station at one time. Kind of like not being able to get into a full chat room. Essentially, it's like the way we buy advertising on Facebook.

I know it's in rough form and all of the parties involved will say it's not fair in one way or another and shouldn't even be tried but I really believe that the number of people in the music industry that understand what needs to be done are starting to out-number the number of people that still don't.

It's like this- the old guard are Bush thinking the best way to deal with "enemies" is to push them around and threaten. The new guard are like Obama, you sit down with them and find ways to work together to meet one's objectives and create "peace" for all.

So, I ask the music industry power-brokers that listen too much to their attorneys and not enough to their publicity departments that...

Are you ready to make "peace" with the underground (again)?