[echelon]

Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors.

The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishers.

The problem would be surviving without being sued long enough to gain the traction and acceptance that Spotify has.

The real problem, of course, is that there are a billion different news organizations with independent paywalls and gateways. It's a hassle to sign up for them all and completely unreasonable to expect that we should subscribe to all of them. Because they don't have a federated micro transaction model in place, the solution is to come up with one for them and get them to adopt it. It's better for both us and them, they just don't know it yet.

Could it work?

[rayiner]

Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

[echelon]

> The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

That's a great point and speaks to a true danger with this model.

I imagine content publishers could distribute their content across multiple distributors if they existed, though I imagine the market would only support a handful of competitors.

> Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested. How was this provision created, and did they start their business with a law team? How were they able to get this accepted? What about other, earlier entrants in this space? Grooveshark obviously failed (they walked a slightly shadier path), but had they tried to get on proper legal footing they might have made it.

Could a news aggregator start out as a Grooveshark, then pivot into a Spotify without getting sued into oblivion?

[dehrmann]

> Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested.

I think they're thinking of DMCA radio licensing. This is what Pandora, not Spotify uses/used, and why you can't play specific tracks on Pandora.

[scarface74]

There is no compulsory license for on demand music streaming where you can choose what songs you want to listen to and when. The compulsory license was for streaming radio stations where you can’t choose the exact songs you want to listen to like Pandora.

Proof? A radio can play any music it wants to and an artist/record label can’t stop them as long as they have a license. An artist can stop Spotify from including them in their music library.

[eitland]

Blendle has been doing something similar and I happily send some dollars their way from time to time although I'd admit it would probably be more if they hosted more linux magazines etc.

Also I hear they are changing their business model to monthly payments. If this is true I guess I'm out unless they suddely - like Spotify - will give me access to everything I'm interested in.

[jayd16]

Like a reddit/HN that only allows scraped amp pages? Seems restrictive when most people still upvote pay walled articles.