I used to think I cared a lot about major labels, but there's nothing good coming out on major labels anymore.
Just use what.cd to download the entire catalog of old artists you might like (or rip your CDs, or iTunes, or whatever), and use earbits for discovery of new music.
(Similarly, about 2 years ago, I realized I'd prefer to give up all broadcast TV/movies than Youtube...)
I would prefer if earbits did a little more fine-grained curation of channels; the programmatic "stations" from Pandora are a great idea.
The one thing I like about Pandora is how well it categorizes music I already have, but the licensing terms (limited-skip) even for Pandora One, make it kind of painful if you listen long enough.
Nowadays, all label names mean to me are filters for companies whose CDs I shouldn't by because of moronic DRM that might prevent me from ripping them or play them in a player altogether(!).
EMI is infamous here for that, at least with some local artists.
Honestly i'm more interested to see how they draw in more minor labels and indies. Myspace could have been the biggest indie music promotion engine in the world (and in a way it kind of was), so when someone finally gets a popular service to link people up with local music in a way where they can find stuff they actually like, somebody's becoming a billionaire.
We basically do outbound sales to independent labels right now and get quite a few submissions from unsigned bands every day. As good things happen the labels get more and more excited about what we're doing, and more comfortable that we'll be here this time next year. We just let our labels know about a new partnership that we haven't announced yet and we're dealing with all kinds of admin now due to them adding more music to the catalog.
Just like our existing labels see good things happening and pay more attention, prospects will continue to see us build momentum and closing labels just gets easier.
As for the majors, the way we see it, there is plenty of great music out there and they only have a small percentage of it. If they want to work with us, that's great. But we don't need to beat our head against a wall trying to convince them when there are millions of great songs out there owned by people who are more flexible to work with.
I like your attitude towards the industry and hope you are right about the availability of good music. I am working on something myself in this space and I wonder if I would truly be able to evangelize good indie music to people. It is not a simple answer.
I'm interested in whether anyone from the traditional radio industry sees this as payola. I suppose all they need to do is label it 'sponsored', though I suspect they don't / aren't legally required to.
It really depends on how we approach it. We may technically charge for the ad space you get while your song is playing, and just give priority to those songs for which we have advertisers.
