Mario Mariani of Tiscali has written an open letter to the European music industry, berating them for causing the Tiscali jukebox service to be closed down after just one month of operation.
"It is with great regret that today we find ourselves forced to “turn off” our Tiscali Juke Box service, launched recently on 26 April 2006 in Italy and the UK.
When we launched Tiscali Juke Box our objective was to offer users the chance to legally listen to millions of songs through p2p streaming, selecting them by artist, genre, or simply by choosing predefined playlists made available by other users. This service was developed on Mercora’s platform which, for over a year, has been enormously successful in offering users the possibility to listen legally in the United States.
The service has now been judged by the major recording labels in Europe to be “too interactive” only because it allows users of the Internet (the most interactive of mediums) to carry out searches by “artist” in addition to genre...
It is surprising that after just one month, despite the joint regular testing and fine-tuning phase carried out prior to the launch of the service, the major labels have decided to submit unexpected change requests. Even more surprising is the short-sightedness of the recording industry in not making any effort to understand either the basic needs or habits of music fans that choose to consume music via the Internet, or the acts directly benefiting from this promotion...
It is unfortunate that once again the industry has demonstrated the complete rejection of online legal music based on open systems, and is to the full advantage of the proliferation of music piracy services."
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