The BBC reports this morning that record label Warner Music has announced it will no longer license its music to free streaming sites like Last.fm, Spotify or Pandora.
The news comes on the heels of an announcement yesterday by Warner Music that digital revenue, at $184 million, accounts for 20% of total revenue.
The BBC quotes Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr as saying that “free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.
In January, we wrote about a report by analyst firm Forrester that predicted that music industry revenues would continue their slide before evening out in 2013, with digital music sales taking up most of the slack.
“On a constant-currency basis, digital revenue grew 4% sequentially and was up 5% from the prior-year quarter,” reads yesterday’s report from Warner.
The BBC doesn’t say when or how this will affect the average person, but when our favorite artists start disappearing from streaming music sites, we’ll surely notice.
Update:
We got in touch with Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora, who had this to say regarding the effect this would have on the company. He writes:
This all started with Edgar Bronfman’s comment on the Warner conference call where he was addressing free on-demand services such as Spotify that are directly licensed. Pandora operates under a different licensing structure and won’t be impacted by Warner’s apparent decision with respect to free, on-demand services.
