od2 and the penny-per-track streamer
a couple weeks ago, i picked up on the news from slashdot that od2 brought out their penny-per-track streamer service. that was june 15th. a week later, we got the news that loudeye acquired od2. that’s music business news from meta-roj. now let’s play some games.
what’s a penny-per-song work out to in the attention market? if we go with the same assumptions i used back in september, the music-time works out to about 800 hours and 12,000 songs per year, at the low, low price of $218 (1 usd = 0.55 gbp). that’s the financial part… and that’s not terribly interesting, but we need a basis for comparison.
the alternative comes from the sky. of course, these don’t work in europe, and od2’s streamer is only in europe, but despite the barriers erected in the music business, i’m going to go ahead and make the comparison.
xm offers a $50 pc-based receiver, plus $10 a month, or $170 (saving $48), or i can spend that extra money and get a portable self-contained unit. sirius has a similar self-contained receiver at about the same – $100 and $10/month. now, to be fair, these satellite-based streamers actually push 100+ channels, 24 hours a day, including stuff that isn’t music, but for comparison, a 24-hour-a-day-for-a-year stream (131,400 tracks) from od2 would cost $2389.
what we don’t know is how the attention/participation thing works with this. how active do i have to be to work with od2? will i spend hours setting up playlists for myself? will someone else? with the satellite options, i get streaming audio in 100+ different pre-packaged formats, and they work like a radio.
i won’t be rushing out to throw my money at a penny-per-track streamer anytime soon, unless it gets a lot more compelling. maybe a good thing that they closed the deal with loudeye already.