by Greg Sandoval – CNet News
Over the years, Michael Robertson, the man who founded pioneering digital music service MP3.com, has never hesitated to make a prediction about the sector’s future.
“It’s not a business,” Robertson has told me often in the past about ad-supported music sites. Frankly, in the past, I didn’t pay much attention. I do now.
The man who has fought more high-profile battles with the record industry than anybody in technology, and whose experience in digital music is nearly unmatched, has never appeared more prescient. He told me two years ago that ad-supported music sites would perish. The licensing fees required them to pay a penny, or some fraction of that, each time a service streamed a song to a user’s computer, and that was too high to sustain a business. And now just look at the sector. It’s a mess. [Read More]