Playlouder dev blog

I was asked recently to write a guest blog at UK national newspaper website, the Telegraph. Here’s the result.

In it I predicted, perhaps rashly but we shall see, some kind of breakthrough in the uneasy relationship between ISPs and the music industry. It’s long overdue: as anyone can discover with a few internet searches we have been working on building this bridge for the last five years. I was adding my voice to a small wave of comment about us, most of it ill informed about not only our own business model, but also about the enabling technology and the respective positions of ISPs and record labels.

One of our favourite comments was that our enterprise is ‘naive, flawed and doomed to fail’, which we liked so much that we thought we’d make a t-shirt with it.

And one of the reasons I liked that comment so much was that in some way you can apply it to all human endeavour, including blogging itself. It seems that we have created a proposition that some people struggle to accept as possible let alone probable or inevitable. Here’s Jupiter’s Mark Mulligan:

My take is that if they are close to announcing something, it will be significantly watered down from the proposition they’ve been trying to get labels to sign up to for years. (here)

and Paul Resnikoff:

the service represents a step down from current, free acquisition options (here)

You can’t please all the people all the time. I shall continue to predict a breakthrough, sooner rather than later, we shall continue to develop our platform (see the recent job advert on this blog), and we shall continue to make ‘no comment’ to public speculation about our business and partnerships.