John Buckman of Magnatune explains why he’s discontinuing the Magnatune Shoutcast radio stream:

It appears to me that most people who are listening to Internet radio run it all the time (the average listener time is 3h 20m, so that most who stay around are actually listening about 8h at a time, since 50% leave right away) and are not often motivated to purchase what they hear. Rather, they listen to it as background music…We don’t see a plausible business model for Internet radio at this time, at least not one where one has to actually pay for the bandwidth used.