You Are Listening To Los Angeles & Music’s Incredible Lost Opportunities

I've been trying to get a sense of the full range of streaming music and video projects, such as Reelr.tv and Chill, that draw on services like YouTube and SoundCloud to both avoid licensing issues and to offer new ways of enjoying content from such sites. My favorite service to date is actually one that gives the listener the least amount of choice and music marketers little chance to market music, it's called "You Are Listening To" and it features a streaming mashup of SoundCloud tracks, police radio streams and a background pic from Flickr!  It also illustrates the creative forces from which the music industry has resisted benefiting all along.

The original You Are Listening To site featured You are listening to Los Angeles. and I've found its odd juxtaposition of ambient music and the LAPD Radio Stream to be quite soothing, something I would never have imagined until listening to it. Since the initial launch, New York, Montreal, San Francisco and Chicago have been added along with a somewhat hidden channel that switches out the cop streams for audio from YouTube of different speakers on serious topics called You are listening to Deep Thought.

You Are Listening To is a unique project but it's just one example of what can happen when innovative thinkers have access to streaming music and/or music videos. The "what could have been" tale of Napster has been followed by an astounding range of startups and hacked together services which have either infringed upon or skirted the edges of infringement until the music industry's hands were forced by the likes of YouTube to capitulate while streaming music services still struggle to survive the weight of licensing fees.

Though yesterday's ruling in favor of MP3tunes has opened up space for music locker services, the reluctance of major labels to join in the experimentation has resulted in music business models that remain somewhat stunted. But the creativity of web service creators who now have access to streaming audio and video sources without having to pay licensing fees has revealed the even larger potential for new music business models from which the music industry cannot fully benefit because they have kept such developments at arms length.

The creation of APIs, which allow third parties to access content, has facilitated services like You Are Listening To to become what Roman Mars described, in an interview with site creator Eric Eberhardt, as an unofficial "R&D department". As Eberhardt put it:

"RadioReference, Flickr, SoundCloud, and the artists offering Creative Commons royalty free music on SoundCloud could not imagine this content."

But, as Eberhardt also notes, many artists have asked to be on his site, even though the rewards are not monetary.

While the industry's resistance has been well documented, I don't think it's that hard to understand why Napster and the filesharing phenomenon has thrown folks for a loop. Yet it's also becoming evident that in the industry's hardline resistance to any change, many opportunities to benefit from the full creativity of artists and programmers experimenting together has been lost.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. He is currently relaunching Flux Research to pursue his long-standing obsession with web business models. To suggest music services and related topics for review at Hypebot, please contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.