OREILLY -- Yahoo! believes music will disappear from terrestrial radio within 10 years. According to Dave Goldberg, VP Music at Yahoo!, one rock station is closing each week. The music industry knows it cannot get audiences from rock radio. Audiences come more easily from other places. Yahoo! knows that when people discover music online, they buy CDs. At that point of purchase, rock music reenters radio and MTV, which drives airplay from that side of the equation.
From the "Long Tail" seminar at Supernova: Major record labels and movie studios have controlled distribution. When you take away that distribution, they have to be good at either marketing or investing. Right now they're good at neither. In fact, the record business today is huge destroyer of investment capital.
I listen to Yahoo! music and occasionally rate the selections that I hear. Yahoo! has noticed a trend about user music ratings. "Music is a very binary thing: people either love it or hate it. Our ratings, even though people we give people 0-100, most are either 0 or 80-100".
Nat Torkington -- "Supernova 2005 panel"
