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In the wake of recent news surrounding Pandora, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to build something free on the web.
For some reason, it would really upset me if Pandora shut down over this. There’s an argument to be made for the fact that you can listen to music on Pandora, for free, that you have to pay for elsewhere on the web. The music industry is quick to pull the ‘piracy’ card in this case, putting Pandora in a situation where they need to find a way to cope with rising royalty fees, or shut down.
I think the reason this bothers me so much is this: the people who built Pandora didn’t mean for people to ‘steal’ music. There are plenty of easier ways on the web to pirate much more content much more quickly than to listen to it piece-by-piece on Pandora. They’ve even spent time to create measures to prevent this kind of activity from taking place. But it’s easier for the music industry to threaten Pandora than to take a hard look at what they’ve built and realize that these people tried to build something good, for free. For users and artists.
Seeing the strictly zero-sum attitude our society takes to these kinds of ideas is really sad, sometimes.
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artistspaid reblogged this from kevintwohy
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davidhoffman reblogged this from kevintwohy and added:
post from kevintwohy...pandora situation. Read
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kevintwohy posted this
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