Amazon and Pandora to Gauge Music’s Value in the Internet Age

Luke Hemmings of the band 5 Seconds of Summer at the Pandora Summer Crush concert last month in Los Angeles.

How much are people willing to spend for streaming music?

For years, thanks to rigid pricing structures at streaming services, the answer has been stuck at $10 a month or nothing. But that model may soon be challenged by two giants of online media: Amazon and Pandora Media.

Both companies are set to introduce new versions of their streaming services in coming weeks, charging as little as $5 a month, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the process was ongoing. The plans will put pressure on incumbent players like Spotify and Apple Music and offer the music industry a major test regarding the value of streaming music — including the crucial question of whether discounts will be enough to entice people to pay anything when virtually every song is also available free.

Music Industry’s New Revenue Stream: Videogame-App Makers

Record labels and publishers strike deals with SongLily, a licensing platform 

A game developer recently paid SongLily $1,440 to license ‘Ace of Spades’ by metal band Motörhead. Photo: Joel Ryan/Associated Press

The music industry has identified a rare constituency willing to pay handsomely for music in the digital age: videogame-app makers.

In recent months, major record companies and publishers have struck agreements with a startup called SongLily, a music-licensing platform aimed at videogame and mobile-app builders. There are about 19 million of these software developers world-wide, according to Evans Data’s 2016 Global Developer Population and Demographic Study.

The deals allow SongLily to offer some of the labels’ well-known songs to game and app developers for an annual flat fee, currently about $1,440 per major-label song, for up to 100,000 app downloads or unique registered players.