Licensing Fees Force Pandora to Shut Down U.K. Music Service
Sad new for our friends across the pond — Pandora.com has been forced to shut down its UK music streaming operation due to high licensing fee demands from the record companies. Pandora has already shut down all its non-U.S. properties due to high royalty fees, but the company was holding out on the U.K. service because it thought a compromise might be possible.
However, Pandora founder Tim Westergren recently sent out an e-mail to Pandora users explaining that the U.K. version of the site would have to shut down. In the e-mail Westergren writes, “both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.”
Of course those who are handy with a proxy server will always be able to spoof their way around any sort of IP-based block, but for the rest the loss of Pandora means one less way to discover new artist and songs.
In the e-mail Westergren goes on to expresses some the frustration many Pandora users in the U.K. (and elsewhere) are also probably feeling right now:
It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don’t often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent — and by that I mean both well known and indie artists.
With the death of DRM being trumpeted about now that Sony has quietly turned its back on its rootkit past, you might think that perhaps the recording industry is ready to embrace new ways of spreading the word about both established and upcoming artists.
But you’d be wrong.
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