Creeping Costs

Maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's just music. But I've been noticing a lot more costs associated with using internet services lately. Radio@Netscape, which used to be a free service you could access from anywhere, first went to a downloaded-program-only setup, and then to a semi-subscriber-only basis. As a non-subscriber, I can listen to Radio@Netscape - which used to be Spinner.com - for free, but only for a few hours a day. After that, it turns off. If I want complete access, I have to be an AOL member, and use Radio@AOL. The reason they give is that the music companies are making them pay for music. This may be a new development, or it may be a guise to cover a desire for more revenues. The new service I've switched to, Live365, isn't as neatly organized or commercial-free as Radio@Netscape and it has popups, but at least it's free. Well, it's mostly free. If you pay to become a V.I.P., you can access some specially reserved stations and you can override the blocks that occur when too many people are listening to a station at once, and you get rid of the popups.

Meanwhile, advertising revenues are way up all over the internet, so I doubt it's a loss of ad dollars that's fueling the apparent rise in cost of internet services. It may, however, be a number of other things. To look at it positively, it may reflect the rising quality of services available. It certainly takes some manpower to offer some of what they do, and it takes tons of bandwidth, especially for music. We may just be paying to cover the cost of what we use (perish the thought!), when before it was offered free at a loss to get us hooked. It could, alternatively, reflect a change in management away from the geek culture of the 1990's as more traditional management takes over the tech sector in the wake of its stock collapse.

Either way, it's obvious that I'm pretty vacuous these days, since I'm reduced to blogging conjecture on an inane subject.