Billboard Drops Paywall, Adds Streaming for a Dime

Billboard.com, still considered the leading trade publication for the popular music industry, is dropping its paywall on its website, making all of their Hot 100 and related chart data available for free.

To be honest, I hadn’t known this info was behind a paywall.  I’ve never really done any deep music chart research.  Still, it strikes me as a wise move since I can’t imagine it is hard to find others listing this data for free elsewhere on the web, legally or not.

The stranger part of the Billboard announcement is how they are hoping to earn money from selling access to actual music.  Billboard, it seems, has a deep library and all the proper agreements in place with the labels so they are a natural source for finding music.  However, their plan is weird:

The site…will offer free music streaming and paid downloads, both powered by digital music site Lala. Users will be able to stream a song once for free, and then pay 10 cents to access it anytime thereafter.       LINK

It’s that last part that seems so weird.  You listen to a song once and then you pay them a dime to be able to come to the site and stream it again anytime you want?  What if you want to listen to the song on your iPod or on your laptop during a WiFi-less flight?  Even at the cost of a dime, it doesn’t seem like you are getting much for your money.

Plus, as we all saw with Amazon going onto people’s Kindles and removing books they’d already paid for, these licenses are absolutely nothing like actually buying the content.