Sony Attempts To Enter the Realms of Online Music

By:  Brandon James Scott Scholl

So, I was on Youtube watching some videos and a commercial came on for a new service that Sony is putting out.  It's called the Sony Entertainment Network.  Basically it's a way of listening to music without running out of things like skips as opposed to using Pandora Radio and only being able to skip 6 songs in the span of an hour.

    Anyways, I figured why not check it out?  I mean, I don't know about you, but there are times that the skipping limitations on Pandora can be slightly frustrating.  However, after I signed up for an account on their website for Sony, I quickly realized that to be able to use this music application on their website, you have to pay a subscription fee.  Otherwise, you can look up any song you want and all you get is the first 30 seconds of the song in a preview.

    After, finding this out, I quickly deleted this website from my memory and unregistered my account.  Although, thinking about it kind of makes sense that something like this is coming from Sony in the first place.  For those of you that aren't aware, Sony decided to attack the hackers and pirates within the gaming community throughout the world.  The result of their actions was CONTINUOUSLY being hacked and losing millions upon millions of dollars due to their lack of thinking about what they were doing.  Granted, they were losing money because people were uploading, sharing, and downloading their video game content through torrent and peer to peer sharing sites online.  However, the percentage of the gaming community actively using their games and consoles was only a miniscule 8-9% of the gaming community in the WORLD.  So, to be honest, an organization that already had tons of money to their name decided to be greedy and make an irrational decision to go after a minority.  The end result?  losing WAY more money than they would ever gain from taking care of the hackers and pirates.

    So, back to the original topic, Sony came up with this expensive knock-off of Pandora and they think that they're going to make a considerable profit on it.  Granted, I can't say FOR SURE what they were thinking when they did this.  But, what I can say is whoever goes for this needs to rethink about how they live their lives.  Between Pandora Radio, Grooveshark, and several other online music on Demand websites out there, this attempt to enter the online music arena isn't the best idea for them in the long run.  At least, that's what I think.