As someone who has built their entire career around the convergence of technology and music, nothing pains me more than to see artists ripped off by advancements in technology. Whether we’re talking about the Napster days of the early 2000s or Grooveshark today, artists continue to be undercompensated (if compensated at all) for their work. While we’ve certainly taken some great strides towards fairly discovering and obtaining music, there is still a lot of work to be done. That’s why I was delighted to learn about Rdio, an ad-free music subscription service.
Rdio was founded in 2010 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, whom you might remember from the illegal file sharing service Kazaa which followed Napster’s demise. Similar to other services like Spotify and Rhapsody, Rdio allows users to stream an unlimited number of songs from their computer or smartphone for a monthly fee. Artists are compensated based on the number of plays their songs get per month. Unfortunately we’ve seen through these services that this model results in artists being undercompensated; often times getting fractions of a penny per play or a check for 4 dollars at the end of the month. Some artists, such as Coldplay and Adele, have kept their latest work off of subscription based streaming services because they feel it hurts album sales.
Today Rdio has announced a new program that aims to compensate artists more fairly and increase fan engagement while at the same time getting new subscribers. The Rdio Artist Program will use artists as recruiters and will compensate them $10 dollars for each subscriber they sign up. Rdio gives the artist the tools to customize their page and share their content on social media. One of my favorite features is the ability to have artists share their favorite songs and playlists that they’re listening to, a feature I always thought iTunes should have. Rdio CEO Drew Larner calls the program a “Win-win” for all parties involved.
With only about 10 million subscribers around the world, it’s hard to say whether or not this program will sink or float but a few big artists are already getting onboard such as Snoop Lion, Scissor Sisters, A-trak, and Chromeo. Could this possible be the next big thing? If it gets artists paid fairly while giving the customer a better experience, let’s hope so.
