Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web:
Streaming execs at Advertising Week: The CMOs of Pandora and Spotify shared a stage at Advertising Week New York and spoke about the pros and cons of the current music streaming business. Simon Fleming-Wood of Pandora and Spotify’s Seth Farban talked about their platforms as complementary in their respective ad-supported and subscription business models. Both execs also spoke positively about the entry of Apple into the field. “What’s a better competitor than Apple?” said Farban. “Apple is helping us validate streaming as the future of the music industry.”
Will Aurous be legit or not? For a seemingly underground platform, Aurous has gotten a surprising amount of attention before even launching. The service calls itself “PopCorn Time for music,” referencing an illegal site for watching movies. The music industry has been making preventive moves to keep Aurous to from getting off the ground, but its creators are now saying that the site is on the up-and-up. TorrentFreak has the full discussion of Aurous’ planned content-ID and DCMA takedown features for creators.
IAB joining the fight against ad-blockers: The Interactive Advertising Bureau has entered the ad-blocker fray. The organization is preparing new steps to help small publishers to fight against technology that limits the effectiveness of many current ad models. It is working on tools to help with ad-blocker detection, but according to Advertising Age, the more long-term effective strategy seems to be new ad models that don’t irritate the end user.