I just read in an TC article again an article about a music site “Troubles At Imeem, But Company Says No Shutdown Imminent“. The statement which made me laugh was “Online music is a tricky business, where rabid users can actually quickly put you out of business simply by listening to too much music.”. Even Last.fm announced yesterday that they start to charge for their service (except in the US, UK and Germany), because they need to generate revenues and not only traffic. Well the cost for a stream are about $0.01 and if the streaming services can’t survive at this rate there might be only the chance to charge a fixed fee for its service like spotify or to force the users to pay attention to the advertisement.
In my opinion is (streaming) music only a way to sell other related products to the customers, but even this could be quite tough when they are listening too much music…
