RIP streaming music?

Boy am I glad that I didn’t go for the yearly payment option with Napster, even if meant a discount… It seems that Sony’s publishing branch doesn’t want their tunes streamed now or ever again, thanks to a fight about royalties, according to Billboard. What’s scary isn’t just that this effects other services like Rhapsody and MediaNet but also, as the article notes, “other major publishers are also expected to stop future licensing of the services.” That means that streaming services are effectively gonna get killed off unless some new agreement is reached.

You gotta hand it to the music industry — even after killing off DRM, they still find ways to screw up their business by placing new walls and barriers up and making music less accessible to people once again. The end result is that music lovers are driven to other ways to get the music which ultimately ain’t gonna get any money back to the publishing companies who license the songs. But hey, what’s a little more wrong-headed thinking about an industry that’s in decline? If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d say that’s why Napster was trying to push consumers to buy their yearly model, knowing that they’d be locked in for 12 months, even after they’d lose some/most of their streaming privileges. But they wouldn’t cook up a scheme like that, would they…?