As most things go...

People always find ways to ruin a good thing:

A group representing artists and record labels reached a royalty-fee agreement with music Web sites, ending a two-year battle and removing a cloud from over online radio.

"It's a substantial reduction in per-song streaming fees," says Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Inc., an online music service that will stream about one billion hours of music this year. The royalties question threatened Pandora's viability and hung over all aspects of the business, he said, making it hard to negotiate with potential partners. Now, "we're out from under that," he said.

But as a result of the new royalty rates, Pandora plans to start charging its heaviest users a fee. Those listeners on the free version of Pandora who tune in for more than 40 hours a month will have to pay 99 cents to keep listening for the rest of the month.

To be clear, I'm not one of those who insists that all the best things in life should be free; it's only right that artists are compensated for the use of their work. Yes, Pandora owes royalties.

And it's not the .99 cents...who can't afford a dollar-a-month for anything? But why should the end-user pay?

It's called advertising (something they're already doing btw). By one estimate Pandora has 30 million registered users. Surely it's possible to create an advertising rate-structure that generates enough revenue to meet expenses and turn a profit beginning next year as they are currently targeting.

Ooops

It didn't take long and we found out who the mystery creator of the Hillary 1984 ad was. Sadly, for Phillip de Vellis it also didn't take long for his firm to react:

This afternoon, an employee at our firm, Phillip de Vellis, received a call from Arianna Huffington of "The Huffington Post" regarding the "1984" video currently circulating online. Initially, de Vellis refused to respond to her requests. He has since acknowledged to Blue State Digital that he was the creator of the video.

Pursuant to company policy regarding outside political work or commentary on behalf of our clients or otherwise, Mr. de Vellis has been terminated from Blue State Digital effective immediately.

Small problem...Blue State Digital works for the Obama campaign and Mr. de Vellis' extra-curricular activities are the kind of thing that makes firms put in that position rather unhappy.

On a side note, he likely won't even make it through the mandatory waiting period for unemployment before he's scooped up by some other agency somewhere else to perform such magic for some other candidate. Under proper supervision of course.