What we find so interesting about this is that the digital music services that report to be friends of musicians are not taking a strong public position against Ad funded Piracy and supporting these measures.
Spotify, Pandora and the like are affected by the downward economic pressure created by Ad Funded Piracy that diminishes both the amount consumers are willing to spend on subscription fees and the amount that can be charged for legitimate advertising on legitimate services.
Why aren’t Spotify and Pandora more publicly engaged in the fight against Ad Funded Piracy as it certainly is a large contributing factor as to why these businesses remain unprofitable.
Websites offering illegal copyrighted material could see their advertising revenue cut under a new initiative.
Police have created an online database of websites “verified” as being illegal.
It is hoped that firms that handle advertising will use the resource to make sure they do not serve advertising on those sites, cutting off revenue.
Top piracy sites generate millions of pounds thanks to advertising.
One estimate, from the Digital Citizens Alliance – a group backed by rights holders – suggested that piracy websites worldwide generated $227m (£137m) from advertising revenue each year.
Even smaller sites commanded revenues into the hundreds of thousands, the group said.
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE BBC:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26788800
The Trichordist 
Reblogged this on The Creative Process.
It’s obvious when you think about it: ad-supported piracy is exactly what Pandora and Spotify need to make themselves look respectable.
This is especially true in the case of Spotify. Given how fundamentally artist-unfriendly their business model is (and it is only marginally more friendly towards major rights aggregators), it would be rather difficult for them to get their stock in trade unless they have the stock excuse: “at least we’re better than the pirates”.
Plus, there’s the off chance that the continued prevalence of piracy will lead to the loosening of copyright protections, which would be of benefit to both services. Pandora even tried the direct approach to rewriting the law in its favour.
In short, services like Spotify and Pandora have nothing to gain from the diminishing of ad-supported piracy – and much to lose. Besides, who needs profits when you’ve got valuations – and we’ve already seen that profit plays little role in those. Growth, on the other hand…
Faza, you make excellent (but sad) points.