MUSIC FOR NOTHING AND YOUR TRACKS FOR FREE
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, C. Deane
With prices of online digital music services going down each quarter and Rhapsody's recent launch of Rhapsody 25 — which enables anybody, even without an account, to listen to as many as 25 streams a month free of charge — the industry is only a few months away from one of the companies offering all-you-can-eat subscription services for free. How will it do this? Well, it can cover the cost of the service by selling ads on the Web properties. For example, if www.somesearchcompany.com can prove to Big Cola Company that 20 million people visit its site daily, that is pretty hot property in the real-estate market of advertising. As big companies can prove these numbers, they can rake in serious money selling ads. It is only a matter of time until at least one of these companies will offer two tiers: one that is advertisement-free for a monthly fee and one that is riddled with banners, ads, pop-ups and so forth for free. Either way, the content providers (record labels) get paid the same amount (whether it is pay-per-stream, percentage of revenue and so on) regardless of what tier the user has selected. But the free option will attract some otherwise wary users.
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