By Margaret Wong
With the crush of Napster's "free-music" business model
comes the rise of dozens of "subscription" music-streaming
sites. One of these sites is www.streamwaves.com. The site offers
to provide instantaneous streaming music, on request, at a monthly
subscription. Claiming to be "THE destination for music",
StreamWaves teamed up with Uplister, an online music community that
will sell playlists to music fans through different music service
providers, in order to provide the usual "one-stop shopping"
atmosphere of other web portals. The Uplister software allows users
to create and publish playlists and comment to others about said playlists
in the community. This is an attempt to provide an interaction between
the subscribers while not creating a one-on-one interaction similar
to electronic chat rooms.
Interaction between subscribers will prove to be a success of some
degree based on the successful track record of word-of-mouth. Communities,
real or virtual, create an available audience to market to. Given
the opportunity, a portal of community communication will circulate
the good and bad of streaming audio. By not making the interaction
one-on-one, it allows for listeners to access music for that purpose
alone. Often times the extraneous services are not needed. If StreamWaves
is foolish enough to try to charge for the platform for which the
community of music listeners bonds, it will fail and another music
provider will take its place. Because through it all, the audience
just wants to pay a fair fee for the entertainment he or she receives.
In fact, audiences are more than willing to pay for the music if they
feel the product provided is worthy of the cost.
In addition to the services StreamWaves already provides, it is without
a doubt other services can make the site more appealing. Personalization
of music has always been a big hit. If the artists themselves can
appear on the site, through news bulletin commentary or live chatroom
sessions, to promote their music on the site, the audience will be
more than please to pay for the subscription. The audience just wants
to know the money they spend is benefiting the appropriate people.
One of the reasons Napster has succeeded is simply due to the high
cost of every day CD's and the common knowledge that most of the profit
goes to the record label. Therefore downplaying the loss the artists
actually suffer through the use of Napster.
This service could very well shape the future of music acquisition.
Just as services like that of pay-per-view and TV-on-request has pushed
television programming to a different standard, StreamWaves and other
music providers will push that social standard as well. Possibly,
in the near future, streaming audio will replace the radio for much
of the audience. A genre of playlists, whether created by StreamWaves
based on individual subscriber's interest, or personalized by the
subscriber, will stream like that of the radio with the exception
of talk show hosts and commercials. Just as we use modern technology
to play movies and shows when we want them, music will be the same.
Just as we are accustomed to paying for cable, soon we will be accustomed
to paying for streaming audio.