iPhone 5 Pandora Rival Still Possible As Sony Sets Snag
A lovely bit of news mixed with a bit of a downer for the first owners of the iPhone 5 has come down today from the NYPost where they've got an inside track on deals between Apple and Sony/ATV for streaming music rights. It appears that though Apple had been working on a competitor for the most popular streaming music radio app Pandora, but ran into a last-minute snag in negotiations with Sony/ATV. The Sony/ATV group is the world's largest music publisher and is currently in the process of buying EMI Music Publishing, this eventually placing them in control of 2 million copyrights that span the globe.
Apple's negotiations with Sony/ATV were reportedly down to the per-song rights fees which Sony/ATV asked to be higher than the standard tenths of a penny per stream standard. The NYPost also noted this week that "executives close to the matter" have said Sony/ATV will be pulling out of the two main copyright associations Ascap and BMI by January of 2013. If they do indeed pull out of these groups, licensing songs by businesses across the map will be more difficult as they'll have to go through Ascap/BMI as well as Sony/ATV instead of working with a one-stop-shop, as it were.
Apple's service would act as a main competitor for Pandora as it would be able to lower costs between free streams and final song purchases as they've already got a music store that can facilitate purchases. With iTunes, Apple is already a massively beastly music-toting group, but with a free radio streaming service that could give a more "human" way to the music discovery process, they could move on to a new level.
When word that a Pandora competitor was in the works for the iPhone 5 earlier this year, Pandora company stocks dropped significantly. This new news source notes that "They didn't put whatever they needed to put in the app," and that "It seems they were rushed into it." This same source notes that music streaming from Apple on devices like the iPhone 5 is still a possibility for a software update months in the future – stay alert!