For music lovers Pandora.com offers the best of digital music. Pandora is an Internet radio site that allows users to create their own radio stations and listen to music for free without listening to advertisements. The site is incredibly popular, and users can even listen to their stations on their iPhones, eliminating the need to be near a computer. This, of course, had lead to copyright concerns and questions about whether or not royalties need to be paid to the artists represented on Pandora. According to this article from MercuryNews.com, a judge has ruled that the site must pay royalties to 70 percent of the artists on the popular site. This of course could force Pandora to shut down for good.
This is the latest battle in the digital music copyright wars, and we could have predicted the outcome long ago based on the Napster and RIAA lawsuits. However, while Pandora is the most recent free music innovation to be potentially shut down, there will no doubt be other new technologies to circumvent current copyright laws to allow free access to music.
The current popular means of getting free music is through a service called Bit Torrent. Currently, bootlegs of concerts and other hard to find materials appear on the site, while 
relatively little actual albums appear. This could be the reason that Bit Torrent has remained relatively untouched by the RIAA. However, because the service is essentially a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, we can assume that this too will be shut down before too long.
relatively little actual albums appear. This could be the reason that Bit Torrent has remained relatively untouched by the RIAA. However, because the service is essentially a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, we can assume that this too will be shut down before too long. While the future of Pandora and Bit Torrent remain uncertain, it is a reasonable guess that both will be forced to shut down in the near future. But the "free culture" of the Internet can almost guarantee us that somebody is currently working on a new way to distribute free music.
2 comments:
Man that stinks. Pandora was pretty cool and I had recently bookmarked it on my browsers after our teacher talked about it. There is LimeWire too which is used a lot by people for P2P sharing (I may or may not be guilty of some of this at times...).
Darn! I adored Pandora. I enjoy music, but don't really get a chance to be very exposed to it. I really liked that it would show me other stuff that I would like.
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