Eivind Throndsen of Trolltech sent me an email the other day that left me frustrated and discouraged. He passed along a message he received from Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. I've blogged about Pandora before - it's a fantastic music service (along the lines of last.fm) that helps you to find new music. Music that you buy. Music that pays those starving artists and their greedy music label landlords. But d Eivind Throndsen of Trolltech sent me an email the other day that left me frustrated and discouraged. He passed along a message he received from Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. I’ve blogged about Pandora before – it’s a fantastic music service (along the lines of last.fm) that helps you to find new music.Music that you buy. Music that pays those starving artists and their greedy music label landlords. But despite the fact that Pandora actually helps people find more music to buy, the is inexplicably trying to kill it, as Tim writes: I’m writing today to ask for your help. We’ve had a disastrous turn of events recently for internet radio: Following an intensive lobbying effort on the part of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has just dramatically increased the fees internet radio sites must pay to the record labels – tripling fees and adding enormous retroactive payments! Left unchanged by Congress, this will kill all internet radio sites, including Pandora.I cannot fathom the depth of idiocy that the RIAA has descended into to make this move. I’ve said before that the music labels don’t have an IP infringement problem – they have a payment problem. In other words, they need to think through facilitation of payment on the web. Honest people will continue to pay for good content, just as they always have. Most people are honest. But all of this is somewhat beside the Internet radio rate hike. Internet radio is about exploration of new music. It’s simply not a replacement for iTunes, the CD, vinyl, or anything else. It’s a complement. Thomas Dolby (“She Blinded Me with Science”) says as much in his guest column on the RIAA’s own site:I believe that we should encourage downloads of music, but on our own terms. It’s great to introduce new fans to music, and the Web’s a great place to get them hooked. But obviously, we want this to help us make money from the music, not give away the farm. So permitting the free duplication of digital songs as an alternative to a CD or tape sale is just not okay. We need to find ways to eliminate the illegal piracy of music without killing off the enthusiasm of Web music fans and the open marketplace that enabled its growth.In short, “Downloading of music is not wrong, but we need to figure out good ways to facilitate it and to facilitate making money from/around those downloads at the same time.” Agreed. I’m betting that Mr. Dolby would agree that Internet radio would drive more purchases than it would kill. Why can’t the RIAA join the 21st Century? Lots of people are making money in it. The RIAA is not helping its constituents to do the same. Open Source