I listen to streaming music all day every day while at work/home ect. I pay a monthly subscription to Grooveshark for this. They in turn pay these record labels when I play the music.<p>If they take away music from streaming sites I will go back to the way I did it years ago and download everything. I am not going to buy music from them.<p>Artists make their money from concerts. Record labels make their money from theft and lawsuits.
"The number of potential subscribers dwarfs the number of people who are actually purchasing music on iTunes," Mr Bronfman said.<p>The number of potential customers always dwarfs the actual, that doesn't mean you're going to get them.
Exactly the kind of brain-dead decision Warner has every right to make. I guess I'll be listening to a lot less Warner music. Too bad for them I'm not going to notice. Also too bad that I'm one of the idiots that actually buys stuff he likes from Last.fm.
Two things that would help the music industry I think is to move have free streaming music on sites like Lulu and Last.fm but for a limited number of times. This will still let people discover new music int he manner that many do it online now and will let them decide if they want to spend 50-90 cents to buy the song.<p>Secondly, more profits from song sales should go to the artists themselves. It's hard to feel bad for recording industries please when you read that only minute percentage of CD sales actually go to the artists.
On the contrary it is the continuing existence of dinosaurs like Warner Music that is "clearly not positive for the industry". Artists are doing quite well out of the new reality of the internet -- it's only the record companies that are losing out: <a href="http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-file-sharing/" rel="nofollow">http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artis...</a>
<i>"Not positive for the industry"</i> vs. <i>"Positive for the listener / potential consumer"</i> No surprise which one they're going to choose given their history of treating digital music consumers like criminals.