It costs them around $.002 per listener of a serendipitous play, and 10 cents for the DJ (which is an on demand play)... This could get expensive pretty quickly, so I'd imagine they are negotiating/looking for another source.
Also interesting - to be DMCA compliant, they'll also have to follow other groundrules, so users:
1) May not see ahead in a playlist past the currently playing song
2) May only play or pause the list
3) Can only play 3 songs per artist per hour, maximum
4) Can only play 4 songs from a single album in three
consecutive hours, maximum
What about the feature which lets you upload any mp3 you want and play it to the crowd? A lot of my files don't have the artist information, I don't know how they plan to pay to play the song.
Untagged files are not processed properly by the uploader. You'll get a "General Upload Error". This also seems to happen when there are multibyte characters in the ID3 tags.
I've had that error occur several times, and then the file finally made it through.
It was from a Russian band, tagged with presumably non-ascii characters, but it finally went through, and I really really doubt they have some of the other things I've uploaded.
It costs them around $.002 per listener of a serendipitous play, and 10 cents for the DJ (which is an on demand play)... This could get expensive pretty quickly, so I'd imagine they are negotiating/looking for another source.
Also interesting - to be DMCA compliant, they'll also have to follow other groundrules, so users:
1) May not see ahead in a playlist past the currently playing song
2) May only play or pause the list
3) Can only play 3 songs per artist per hour, maximum
4) Can only play 4 songs from a single album in three consecutive hours, maximum
5) May skip ahead only 6 times per hour.