Disappearance of SomaFM streams

[Prokofy Neva]

On 9/16/2021 at 4:52 PM, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Soma needs to learn that the person streaming paying the royalties, not the listeners. 

I'm not getting what Soma is "supposed to learn" here.

Listeners don't pay subscription fees.

Streaming systems have to pay musicians  -- they have to obtain the rights to stream their music. They have costs.

They may have a mixed model with ads or paid subscriptions like Spotify.

If you lift a URL out of a streaming system and you are not exposed to the ads that a normal free listener of that service would get AND you don't pay a subscription fee, why is that streaming service needing to "learn" something.

You need to learn that when you keep stealing, owners block you from stealing.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 9/17/2021 at 10:40 AM, Aishagain said:

@WhirlyFizzleBingo.  I didn't know that.  I'd say that has a lot more to do with this than any of the specious reasons Soma have quoted to me thus far!

However, how do we get around that block?

It seems unlikely that simply disabling the metadata function would solve the issue and yet if an individual streams Soma via an external player or browser, they have stated that they "have no problem with that".  Presented with that situation, it seems to me that Soma would have no case.

 Do we, in fact?  It seems that Soma consider that they have a dominant position in streaming into SL and "they can no longer ignore this situation" .  Put less prettily, they want to create a revenue stream from this.

Unfortunately, by crudely targeting Linden Lab, they hit the wrong target, I suspect.

The original artists get precious little from a stream, but now it seems the conduit wants a share of the pie.

Well crude or not, you can't expect them to come up with ideas like licensing any merchant who wants to buy their streaming service rights for X dollars in bulk, and reselling it in individual devices, which will be like any other SL radio with URLs packed into it. They look for the form of the URL that the legal version of SL Soma would have from the merchant or his customers, and if it is "scrobbled," they block it.

Or Linden Lab pays a fee of some kind in exchange for an end to their blockage.

Artists may not get enough from streams, but ultimately they get nothing from streams that have to give themselves out for free to people who scrobble them, with no ads or subscription plan -- and then they fail. 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 9/21/2021 at 9:28 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

I've been a SomaFM listener in SL for about as long as I've been in SL. In many ways Soma have provided the sound track to my Second Life and for years I had a poster board showing the current station and linking to their site.

I have no interest in going via their website or playing via an app.

They could have just made a "radio" prim that set the parcel stream, set it for sale on the SLM for a couple of bucks and then expired it and the links it would set in about land every 6 months or so and made you buy an new one.

I would have purchased this happily.

So long Secret Agent, Drone Zone and Space Station Soma.

As I just said, they couldn't do it that way because it doesn't scale and the price they might charge would not be payable for most people. But they could sell rights to a stream to a merchant, or Linden Lab, and allow THAT party to sell the individual radio devices.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 9/18/2021 at 6:15 AM, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah, but the current issue doesn't seem to have anything to do with the IP of the audio content. Rather, they appear to be claiming some IP rights to the streaming service itself (as curators or something?), and anyway they're in a position to impose "terms" on providing that service.

But I can't figure out how this benefits them. I get it that they're trying to defeat scrobbling* and so they poison the Shoutcast-standard Now Playing URL "<stream:port>/7.html" with a lame beg for donations (see, e.g., http://ice6.somafm.com/groovesalad-128-mp3/7.html ), and yet they expose those direct streaming URLs in their radio station directories (e.g., https://somafm.com/groovesalad/directstreamlinks.html ) with the rationale:

So they don't seem to be insisting that one use their own (pathetic) web player, and indeed the direct stream URLs work just fine in a browser (e.g., https://ice6.somafm.com/groovesalad-128-mp3 ) so I don't know exactly what they're doing (matching user agent string? seems unlikely), and even more mysteriously, why.

What am I missing?

_______________________
*I also don't understand why anybody would want to discourage scrobbling / now-playing info, although I gather the EU banned Shazam which is kinda like scrobbling I guess? Do they also confiscate all Android phones with that magical ambient Now Playing local hash on background music? It's like lawyers are pining for the good ol' days of Napster lawsuits. I don't understand any of it.

But they do get to claim IP rights when they have paid artists for licenses to their music!

They are rights-holders, and should be respected. They perform a service and pay musicians. Whether it's enough or not is a separate argument. But as a system, there is nothing "predatory" or "illegit" about them.

You are deliberately remaining oblivious to the fact that streams that have free listeners need ads. Otherwise they have no source of revenue. That's why you can get Spotify for free, but every 10 songs or whatever, you have to listen to an ad. If you pay the subscription, the ads disappear. This is a classic business model all over the Internet and isn't any different than the Lindens' free accounts that doesn't have all the features.

Napster was grand theft and it was good it was shut down.

When these criminals at the dawn of the Internet were allowed to devalue first news media, then music, then everyone's content, they set up the regime where Facebook with all its evils could be created. You have to see the connection. When you destroy private property and commerce for people so you can have commerce and private property, it doesn't end well.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 9/21/2021 at 9:38 PM, Aishagain said:

So many folks wax lyrical about  how much Somafm streams meant in their Second Lives..The CEO of Somafm vouchsafed this to me:

"People buy and sell parcels and virtual goods in SL all the time, so if someone could come up with a way for use to successfully monetize the use of our streams in SL, we'd be open to that. But as it stands now, no one wants to pay and instead say "think of all the exposure you get". But you can die from exposure too.

And when you take away something people have considered as free (or start charging for it), they get very upset.

We actually tried creating a subscription music service specifically for Second Life many years ago, but there was no interest in it and we canned the project."

Oh and he said to me that I was the only one who had donated from SL who had contacted him.

Makes ya fink, dunnit.

Might I suggest  that if you are even remotely serious that you email dj@somafm.com

 

I love that quote, It's priceless. Good for him! 

As you know, you can't "try once in 2004" or "again in 2007" to sell something in SL, you have to keep trying and find different ways. The conversation has to be with LL, not this or that resident.

[Qie Niangao]

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

But they do get to claim IP rights when they have paid artists for licenses to their music!

Well, "rights" certainly. The discussion was about who was responsible for paying artist royalties, which was the IP in question, and my response pointed out that SomaFM was in their rights to impose terms on their service (which does, indeed, pay royalties in exchange for a license to offer that service).

The deeper issue here is what business SomaFM is in: how it actually generates revenue. I gather it's neither advertising nor subscriptions but strictly donations, which is apparently very difficult to scale. It seems they must manage how their (free, publicly addressed) streams are accessed, as a way to restrict listeners to a generous few, turning away connections that they think may generate somewhat less lucrative contributions. That's very different from terrestrial broadcasting or Spotify or standard internet radio streams or really any other media service that comes to mind. I'm not convinced that can be viable no matter how cleverly they curate their listenership.

Although I did have SomaFM stations set as land radio on some of my parcels, it's all academic to me personally: I very rarely have my computer's sound turned on at all, even less often enable sound in Second Life, and almost never enable parcel audio unless there's a live artist. If it's somehow a burden to SomaFM that SL parcel passersby may connect to their streams, fine: I've replaced their URLs with others I'll almost never hear anyway.

[Ayame Musashi]

SomaFM has been around for many years as a listener supported, donation based music streaming service. They survive on the donations from listeners, and I can only imagine the number of parcels that have SomaFM streams assigned to them. I have come across them countless times in my nearly 18 years of being in Second Life. I am also fairly certain there is only a handful of actual donators/subscribers, in Second Life. So it makes perfect sense to me that SomaFM would block something that is as huge as Second Life, that is accessing their streams 24/7/365, without showing any regard to their need for support to keep their stations going.

I truly wish their streams were still accessible as they are some of the best curated non-mainstream music available, but I totally understand their position and I do not feel that anyone in Second Life has any right to disagree with their decision, or try to force them to change their mind.

This also has absolutely nothing to do with Linden Lab, and LL has zero responsibility or obligation in this issue, and also shouldn't be bothered with it. This is about end users using a donation based streaming music service they are not paying for, to the point that it has become a burden on the service financially, forcing them to cut the cord.

If you want to make a huge financial donation on behalf of everyone in Second Life to support the station and convince them to reinstate access to their streams from within Second Life, by all means, please do. Or hold fund raising events on a regular basis to donate to SomaFM to keep them happy. But until someone is doing something to give back to SomaFM on behalf of all of Second Life, I support their banning of the use of their streams within.

 

As usual, my two cents.

 

[Greywolf Tsunenaga]

SL has enough money to pay SomaFM for licensing, but refuses. And SL is commercial use, so, someone has to pay the licensing fee demanded by music distributors, not SomaFM.

Edited February 21 by Greywolf Tsunenaga

[Persephone Emerald]

2 hours ago, Greywolf Tsunenaga said:

SL has enough money to pay SomaFM for licensing, but refuses. And SL is commercial use, so, someone has to pay the licensing fee demanded by music distributors, not SomaFM.

It's been awhile now since we had SOMAFM in SL. Take a look at Radio Paradise to see how that works for you.

[mygoditsfullofstars]

5 hours ago, Greywolf Tsunenaga said:

SL has enough money to pay SomaFM for licensing, but refuses. And SL is commercial use, so, someone has to pay the licensing fee demanded by music distributors, not SomaFM.

So you know what the overall cost would be for every person who wanted to have it on their parcel/region plus all the traffic in and out of the region that connected and listened to the stream? Unless you are LL's accountant and can see the books, you cant sit there and say they are rolling in money and can afford it, none of us are privy to LL's financial position.... Why should LL pay for it? Lets assume for arguments sake LL decided to do this, do you really think that expense wouldn't trickle down the pipe to somewhere else in the form of higher fees for land, currency transactions etc?

[Monty Linden]

7 hours ago, Greywolf Tsunenaga said:

SL has enough money to pay SomaFM for licensing

Are you kidding?  We have to share trouser pockets here...

[Sid Nagy]

13 hours ago, Monty Linden said:

Are you kidding?  We have to share trouser pockets here...

Is there a donation box somewhere?

[Aishagain]

Well well.  This is a situation that I dealt with some 2 years or more ago. I am astonished that someone bumped this thread after more than 2 years!

I discussed the funding requirements of SomaFM with Rusty then and it became rapidly clear that there was to be no meaningful communication between SomaFM and Linden Lab/Tilia.

SomaFM were only vaguely aware of SecondLife or the number of folk who used their streams and were not at all interested in streaming to virtual worlds anyway.

There was no convincing SomaFM of the potential available.  I did try.

Subsequently I spent my effort convincing (successfully) Radio Paradise to fulfill that role.

Edited February 22 by Aishagain
Putting the horse before the cart in Radio Paradise's case

[Persephone Emerald]

45 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

Well well.  This is a situation that I dealt with some 2 years or more ago. I am astonished that someone bumped this thread after more than 2 years!

I discussed the funding requirements of SomaFM with Rusty then and it became rapidly clear that there was to be no meaningful communication between SomaFM and Linden Lab/Tilia.

SomaFM were only vaguely aware of SecondLife or the number of folk who used their streams and were not at all interested in streaming to virtual worlds anyway.

There was no convincing SomaFM of the potential available.  I did try.

Subsequently I spent my effort convincing (successfully) Paradise Radio to fulfill that role.

Thank you. I love my Radio Paradise streams. For those who prefer some of the more unusual channels on SOMA fm, I wonder what else could work for them?

Edited February 22 by Persephone Emerald

[Love Zhaoying]

14 hours ago, Monty Linden said:

Are you kidding?  We have to share trouser pockets here...

* puts paw in Monty's pocket *

What's dat in dere!?

[Sid Nagy]

My two cents: There are at least a gazillion or two different streams out there.
No need to interest any of them for SL. Peanuts numbers at best. Everybody can pick what they are most comfy with and let it play on their plots.

Edited February 22 by Sid Nagy

[Sid Nagy]

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

* puts paw in Monty's pocket *

What's dat in dere!?

Did you find a nickel?

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Did you find a nickel?

I found a paw! I grabbed it, and it grabbed mine at the same time! Eerie!

[Qie Niangao]

11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

 I grabbed it, and it grabbed mine at the same time! Eerie!

Uh oh. Is there a Monty monkey attached?

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Uh oh. Is there a Monty monkey attached?

Hey! I avoided "banana" jokes!!