But as far as intimidating intros go, where does it rank? I ask you, America: Ivan Drago in Rocky 4 or Jay-Z from Game 2?

I sometimes think I was the last person on Earth to fall in love with Pandora. It was a quick courtship—in just a matter of weeks, Pandora became the background music to my day. It didn’t matter if I was at work or at home, the world just felt silent without her. And once I found Pandora for Blackberry, we were joined at the hip. Literally.

It seemed perfect. I had found a limitless library of music that was sincerely interested in me. I would talk, she would listen. I would “thumbs up” Mos Def, and she’d introduce me to Atmosphere. I’d “thumbs down” The Offspring, and she’d remind me how much I loved The Darkness. It was summertime and I was in love. It was kismet. And it was free.

July 7th started off like any other Thursday, but that morning I got an e-mail that I’ll never forget. Pandora was leaving me for someone new. His name? “Revenue”.

I was crushed.

Our favorite Web sweethearts, YouTube, Facebook, Digg and (my favorite) Twitter, all operate in the red. Despite their rock star status and the seemingly endless amount of time I spend on these sites, not a single one has turned a profit. Emulating King Gillette is a great game plan, but why give away the razors when you have no clue how to make a blade?

Lately, we’re seeing more companies try to buck the trend. Small startup 37signals and their hugely popular project management tool Basecamp has been charging from day one. On the other end of the spectrum, global media mogul Rupert Murdoch plans to build an online pay wall for the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in 2010.

But will anyone actually pay? More importantly, will I pay for Pandora after having my heart broken? On the Internet, the gap between $0.00 and $0.01 is a chasm, and we’ve been trained to expect the former. Pandora’s new $0.99/month charge for access to more than 40 hours of music (or $36/year for unlimited music via Pandora One) is absolutely miniscule, but I still remember a fraternity brother strolling into my room a full 10 years ago babbling about free music and some program called “Napster” that some kid down the street had built.

As a die-hard geek, this was a watershed moment for me. Am I really going to pay for music? A co-worker (and fellow Pandora user) summed it up best in an IM, “Mark–you could pay that 99 cents, or, maintain your dignity. Time will tell…”.

So what did I decide? Let’s just say I’m one hour away from hitting my 40-hour quota for September, and for the second month in a row I’ll be selling my geek dignity for the price of a Biggie fries.

I’m sure my Commodore 64 is rolling over in its grave, but paying for a service this good actually feels right. And if an early adopter like me is okay with it, what does it mean for the mainstream? After an atrocious 18 months for tech companies that saw many enter the deadpool, expect many of the survivors to start charging monthly subscriptions. I’d also bet we’ll see companies in different industries band together with package deals, “Get music from Pandora, news from the Post, traffic alerts from Fox, and weather alerts from AccuWeather for just $9.99/month with the SuperGloboTron Everything Plan!”

So how does that saying go? “Once is an aberration, twice is a trend”? After two months of ponying up, be sure to check back in to see if I crack the wallet open in October. I’m pretty sure three times represents a seismic shift.

It took me longer than usual to recover from SXSW this year. The isitrocking experiment had me down on sleep before things even got started, and hitting B-Side’s late-night dancefest on opening night that featured video DJs Eclectic Method to celebrate RiP: A Remix Manifesto’s premiere, sealed my fate.

I have a love/hate relationship with Hip Hop. I was a regular at Nasty’s on Monday nights for years. Heck, we originally started WnDc just as an excuse to see DJ Mel spin on Wednesday nights. Unfortunately, what lurks on the underside of that slash is my firm belief that the current state of commercial Hip Hop has set African-Americans back decades. It’s not often I get excited about new acts, but…

…Eclectic Method absolutely blew my mind.

With projection screens surrounding the dance floor, we didn’t just hear the music, we got to appreciate the mixing of music in a completely new medium. Even their cross-faders had little video screens! Sure, it took a while to warm to the idea of dancing and watching a screen at the same time, but when they sliced and looped a video of Obama preaching, “A government for the puppy, by the puppy” and put it to a beat, we all lost it.

Now, Eclectic Method isn’t strictly about Hip Hop, but their performances raise really interesting questions about mixing and sampling content, and no genre has embraced mixes and samples more than Hip Hop has.

But…it’s not a level playing field. Diddy can pilfer any track he wants, but high school sophomores get DCMA smackdowns if they cover “Winter Wonderland”. The Beatles handled the 2004 Grey Album just about as horribly as one could, but there are whispers they’re finally arriving on iTunes soon, and they’re even releasing a Rock Band-like Beatles game with Harmonix. Lars Ulrich led the early charge against Napster, but even he now admits that Trent Reznor is on the right track. Record Labels aren’t happy with their relationship with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but Guitar Hero: Aerosmith made more money for the band than any one of their records ever did.

So all this craziness makes me wonder…

- What exactly is attribution?
- Is money the only way to appease the RIAA?
- What if each audio track had to identify each sample?
- What if each video had to show the source of each audio sample?

Come this fall, it’ll be 10 years since a fraternity brother strolled into my room babbling something about free music and some executable called Napster, but all of us (labels, artists, and fans) are still trying to figure out how to make all this work.

And I think it’s gonna be a while longer ’til we do.


If you’re in NYC, go check out Eclectic Method’s show tomorrow night and take lots of pictures for me. Everybody else, go snag their latest video mixtape. It’s hot.