Pandora and the Music Industry

Back in September I wrote about how I had discovered the Internet radio station Pandora and how wonderful I thought it was. What I didn't mention at the time, though I knew about it, is that for the last 2 years or so Pandora has been on the brink of going bankrupt. The reason for their financial crisis is that--for every song played on Pandora--the service has to pay a fee to the record companies, and in 2007 the record companies wanted to DOUBLE those fees. That's a huge increase for anyone. Imagine if your local grocery store doubled your grocery bill overnight! Or imagine if gas companies doubled the price of gasonline in just a few months. No, wait...

...Anyway, I read online yesterday that Pandora and the other online music stations reached a compromise to pay the music industry something closer to one and half times what was being paid previously. That's better and will keep the web radio companies in business, but that's still MUCH more than either traditional radio or satelite radio pays. And I think that's unfair, because, if the music industry wants to generate record sales, I can think of no better source than Pandora. I just looked back through all of the music that I have purchased since September, and only one CD did I purchase as a result of something that I heard on traditional radio (Nickelback's latest CD, which as I mentioned earlier, I really am starting to dislike as I listen to it more and more). In that same amount of time I have purchased the following music as a result of listening to Pandora:

• Everything Missy Higgins has ever done
• Two Over the Rhine CD's
• A song entitled "Make You Feel My Love" by Adele
• "10,000 Stones" by Adrianne
• Several songs by Ani DiFranco, my favorite of which is "You Had Time"
• One at a time, I've purchased about half of the songs off of Brandi Carlile's CD THE STORY. My current favorite is "Wasted."
• Several songs by Eva Cassidy, who a) is dead and b) when she was alive didn't record original songs but instead did original covers of well known songs.
• The latest Indigo Girls CD
• I've downloaded one song ("My Own Two Hands") by Jack Johnson, and I've checked one CD of his out of the library, and I love every song on it. This means I will most likely purchase more of his music.
• A song called "Words Fail You" by Kris Delmhorst. I've never heard any other songs by her, but that song would undoubtedly appear in my Top 100 songs of all time somewhere.
• "Gravity" by Sara Bareilles, and I've been tempted to download several others of hers.

All said, I've probably spent $100 on music that I've heard on Pandora, and about $15 on music I've heard off of the radio. That's because the kind of music I like (I guess you'd call it folk-influenced pop, or maybe more accurately pop-influenced folk) doesn't get played much on headbanger radio stations or Top 40 (which are really more like Top 15 these days) radio stations or on classic rock. The only Cincinnati station that EVER plays music like what I like is NKU's public radio station, and even it only plays that kind of music maybe a third of the time.

So Pandora is where I am discovering new artists, and the record companies would do well to keep that in mind the next time they want to drive them out of business.