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Michael Robertson: the subscription music model is broken

Michael Robertson: the subscription music model is broken

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Michael Robertson has offered some of his insight on the subscription-based music model in a guest column on Gigaom. He postulates that there's no hope in the model because of the overwhelming power that the labels have over music services.

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Michael Robertson, the founder and former CEO of MP3.com, has offered some of his insight on the subscription-based music model in a guest column on GigaOM. He asserts that there's no hope in the model because of the overwhelming power that the labels have, and goes point-by-point to explain how lopsided the deals made with Spotify, Rdio, MOG, and Rhapsody are. Unfortunately he doesn't cite any evidence to back up his claims, but with his experience in the business he should be familiar with how some of these deals work. We do know that artists aren't getting much tossed their way from these deals, so it seems likely that something's not right. Check out the source link to see Robertson's argument, and be sure to pray for your favorite streaming music service.