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> "make 15% more per year, on average, from paying customers of streaming services like Spotify or Rdio than it does from the average customer who buys downloads, CDs or both."

I should point out that people should parse that sentence very carefully to understand the situation. The summary says the labels make 15% more per year, on average, from paying customers of streaming services. Most people aren't paying for streaming services. Here's one source that says that only about 25% of Spotify's regular users are actually paying customers: http://paidcontent.org/2013/03/12/spotify-hits-6-million-paid-users-as-market-for-music-streaming-heats-up/

There's also the fact that people who are free-users of Spotify might be buying less music because of it (i.e. the existence of Spotify might be lowering music sales among the "not paying for spotify" group).

So, should the labels love streaming music? I don't know. But, I'm very skeptical of the notion that the labels should love streaming music over regular music sales (at least as it existed 15 years ago).

It's "effective" because it sufficed to induce people to subscribe to the website -- your freeloading notwithstanding. You know, in the 1990s some people took newspapers out of trash cans and read them, too, so you're not the first person to cheat around the "paywall", and the standard of "effective" is lower than 100%.

I would argue that "monopoly power" is the ability of *one* player to reset the price above the what would normally be a market price. Since the deal Apple brokered among publishers raised the cost of ebooks across all platforms, the term should apply here.

I disagree. In this market, you had en extremely dominant player with 80-90% market share selling products at a loss. One of the benefits of this was extending and maintaining the market share of the Kindle eco system, thus raising the barrier to entry to the market. Another was to train customers into a certain price range. Combining these, it is likely that they could later impose these prices on the suppliers.

Apple entering this unstable market gave the unhappy suppliers an option, which they took advantage of. A new player entering a previously almost monopolized market, and still being a by far smaller player - Kindle still has 50-60% of the market - and being hit by anti-trust laws sounds strange to me. Sure, they probably guessed that prices would increase but that was caused by the intrinsics of this specific market with the 800 lb gorilla selling at a loss. While I think Apple's MFN tactic should be disallowed - at least as far as MFN being applied to the customer price, rather that what Apple would be paying - Amazon also had MFNs in their contracts.

Apple will get into deep waters if this happens to them at the same time as being sued for price fixing ebooks. This kind of abuses should be targetted by the law, after all.

The price was fixed because Apple had a deal that NOBODY could sell to the public at a price lower than they could. The collusion was between Apple and the individual publishers.

And Amazon had and still has almost the same clause - just worse, because in their case the price will stick at the lowest price for ever, making promos for non-Amazon stores impossible. http://feldmanfile.blogspot.de/2012/04/most-favored-nation-landmine.html http://paidcontent.org/2011/11/03/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/business/media/byliner-takes-buzz-bissingers-e-book-off-amazon.html?_r=2&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto&

Such activities involve a pretty large number of people. It's interesting how they collectively can keep it a secret for a pretty long time.

It's even amazing that the "fixed" prices are not essentially different than Amazon or Alibris or BN. Very clever price fixing indeed.

BS they weren't 'different'. They were SIGNIFICANTLY higher. At least $3 to $5 higher under the 'agency' model, which on a book that was $9.99 is a 30 to 50% price hike.

Are you some Apple fanboi or something?

Your pulling monkeys out of your butt. Here's an actual price comparison:

http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/11/apple-is-already-fighting-amazon-in-the-ebook-price-wars/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/cheapest-ebooks-amazon-ibooks-google-barnes-noble_n_1952736.html

Yes sometimes Amazon is cheaper. But mostly not. Sometimes apple is cheaper.

DirecTV alone added a record 645,000 subscribers in the latest quarter. And they added 593,000 subscribers in Latin America during the first quarter.

Raise your hand if you want "social media" mixed with your TV watching experience. *crickets*

Facebook wall activity: "Charles is watching Gilmore Girls on CWTV."

>A couple million people raise their hands

Also, the 2,000 pre-orders (included in the 82,000 figure) were cancelled by Amazon.

A friend asked me what tablets to look at, and I suggested the Transformer, as well as looking at the iPad and laptops. She ended up buyting an iPad and a laptop because, no matter how you put it, tablets suck for certain tasks, even "transformers".

Simply put, if you price it like an iPad, people will buy the "real McCoy", and opt for the iPad. That relegates Android to the bottom of the market. It's like trying to sell a linux desktop computer - except that you can't even GIVE the OS away because it's too fragmented and unstable for retailers to support, or for developers to target with proprietary software that will make them money.

There's a reason why everyone ends up distro-hopping. Even good distros "go bad" over time - witness the buggy KDE4.0 that almost killed OpenSuse, and their 12x update that ate user emails, slackware claiming "we're not dead yet" when in fact their main update repo has been down for a year, Mandrake/Mandriva one step away from a second bankruptcy, Canonical's failures to deliver a promised tablet for two years now - and still not making a profit ....

Simply put, end users continue to believe - rightly - that they are better off with creaky old XP than with any linux distro. Same with tablets - they would rather pay Apple for something that works and gets updates than buy a potential orphan.

No inside info here sorry.

I did not know the Microsoft deal had the precondition to dump Meego/Tizen, I figured it just had the precondition to produce a WP7 phone.

But I do not think the rumors of two new Nokia MeeGo phones would persist at all if Nokia had the precondition to dump Meego; although it appears the rumored phones will at best have the MeeGo GUI and run S40.

A little Google searching on the topic does not reveal any such agreement to abandon Meego, at most Nokia agreed to make Windows Phone its primary platform, do you have a sources to clarify that Nokia has to kill all in house MeeGo development? I hope I have not missed something: paidCOntent, Telegraph, CNet, The Next Web, Microsoft.

But I am sure that it is wishful thinking to think that Nokia will drop Windows Phone and get back behind MeeGo in full force any time soon, if ever...

its a "temporary phenomenon"? why are these fucks so behind the times?

Why link from Slashdot's summary to some other linkfarm's summary? Grrr. DIRECT link -

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-you-can-buy-the-harry-potter-e-books-now/
By Laura Hazard Owen

Android is certainly the bargain option. Apple makes more money than Microsoft in the PC market, so you could say they are "winning". But that would neglect the fact that Microsoft has over 90% market share.

The number of iOS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch) sold last quarter exceeded the number of Android units sold.

On Verizon alone 55% of smartphones sold were iPhones

And this is different from deny global warming how exactly?

You have a populace and politicians in the US who cannot understand the technical, highly interconnected world they live in.

Instead they fill that gap with Christian Evangelism, isolationism and a belief in the free market magic bunny .

This is what the US is. The same heads in the sand types kept the US out of WWII until it was almost too late. They don't know and they don't want to know . Trust me I live by these people.

They've gotten away with it for this long, but i'ts catching up to them and they will not be able to change in time. Reality in the form things like the climate and technological advances has it's own timetable and it really could give a shit about your domestic politics. Accept and adapt or die. How do you like that for social Darwinism?

Oh that's right, you don't believe in Darwin.

Did I read online that software developers are electing to forgo the American apps market for far of being sued under the regressive software patent regime instituted at the behest of and for the benefit lawyers and large IT companies who fear real competition from small startups?

I knew I did:

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-app-developers-withdraw-from-us-as-patent-fears-reach-tipping-point/

Well people can make their own determinations:

One

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"What we've actually been asked to do by Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] is to investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome. We've been over a bunch of these and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need."

The BBC article is light on the details to the point of distorting the issue. There's a better write-up at Paid Content, which also has a link to the complaint. It's not just about ageism; the Jane Doe alleges that IMDb pulled her birthdate from her credit-card information and then published it, ignoring takedown requests.

citation

... but wow, what a fanboyish piece of shit. There is nearly no mention of Apple after its origin.

Leading into Windows 1 (after talking about Xerox, the Lisa, and the first Mac) he says "The era of GUI's was about to start. But apple [sic] was not meant to be the king."

Oh really?

- Vista copied many features straight out of Tiger
- I think we can all agree that WP7 would not look like it does if the iPhone had never been on the scene
- And now, after ten years of making poorly-selling tablets, Apple has shown how it should be done and MS is falling over themselves trying to catch up

I'm not saying Apple has never copied anything either, but once the article hits Windows 1.0, it is all about MS. He goes from Windows 3 to Microsoft Bob, lays down exactly 10 words about Windows 95, then goes straight to XP, Vista, and 7. He dismisses over two decades of Mac OS with the words "In the meantime, Mac OS was undergoing a similar, slow evolution."

He then says "Last couple of years were really eventful. New families of computing devices became wildly popular -- smartphones, netbooks, tablets. Mobile operating systems became almost as complex and capable as desktop ones. Multi touch technologies challenged the age-old interface design, and required new approaches. And now Microsoft tells us the future belongs to tiles." and the rest of the article is about Windows 8 and tiles. REALLY? No mention at all of the iPhone, who was the first to market with multitouch, even if they didn't invent it? No mention of Palm, or WinCE or BeOS or the Amiga or a million other omissions? Come on. If he isn't a shill, he's got a BIG set of blinders on. If you want to see the history of GUIs, go here. They have a ridiculously thorough collection of screenshots.

"[W]hether or not this case settles is not my primary concern. Although Plaintiffâ(TM)s business model relies in large part upon reaching settlement agreements with a minimal investment of time and effort, the purpose of the courts is to provide a forum for the orderly, just, and timely resolution of controversies and disputes. Plaintiff's wishes to the contrary, the courts are not merely tools for encouraging and exacting settlements from Defendants cowed by the potential costs of litigation and liability."

Since Judge Kane is presiding over all of RH's cases in Colorado, that probably does not bode well for them either.

Interesting. I'd mod you up if I could. I doubt many people here are actually arguing for the elimination of copyright, but let's consider that a bit more carefully. Software is the easier one to look at, because it's always a work in progress. There are improvements, upgrades, bug fixes, and compatibility updates to make. If Microsoft took my software and started selling it as their own and put me out of business, they'd be stuck with static buggy code and a lot of upset customers. Consumers would have a natural incentive to buy from the true author (me), because I'll keep it running and they'll get their improvements. For songwriters and composers, the absence of copyright would probably break that business model. But it would also open a world of possibilities, where mashups and samples could be freely applied as the artist desires, without having to negotiate or investigate the legality of each piece. It would create a world where we could watch babies dance to Prince songs, or sing "Happy Birthday" to our niece without having to first negotiate performance rights. It would be different than the current market model, but I doubt it would be the catastrophe you envision. It might even be kinda neat.

Biden is a known shill for the media cartel. As far back as 2002 Biden held a Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2002 on “Theft of American Intellectual Property” And Vice President Joe Biden is a co-founder and co-chairman of the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus.

Here is a choice quote from the Vice President Joe Biden to chew on: “When somebody holds you up on the street and takes your wallet, we call it robbery,” Biden said in May 2007. “And when somebody steals your idea and creation, we call it theft, plain and simple.”

Lets face it. Biden is no friend of the people.

You will have paid for newspapers, like the financial times, that contain news worth paying a premium for, which they won't publish online.

There was an article 2 days ago about how FT "sees a five-year trajectory for having exited print in substantial part."

However, in another article yesterday another spokesperson say they have no plans to scale back printing and go all digital.

I'm not quite sure about Schmidt's stake, but Page and Brin are selling off the voting majority.

First, the bank ALREADY HAS HIS INFORMATION because of his bank account. You think he somehow signed up for a checking account without filling out contact information? Citibank doesn't hand out accounts on street corners.

Second, the startup apparently has backing from "The Washington Post Company, Mayfield Fund’s Allen Morgan, Xing founder Lars Hinrichs, and Burson-Marsteller’s Don Baer." E.g. people with money and connections. Hardly a mysterious, unknown person.

Third, they didn't say this was a compliance failure. They said it was because of "objectionable content."

Actually, from what I've heard it pays WAY less.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-fair-dos-a-million-spotify-streams-earned-gaga-167/

Looks like a simple business decision to me.

If that were true and streaming services actually made a profit then the last thing they would do is pull out. It's a simple business decision; if something doesn't turn a profit you stop doing it.

To put it another way; would you invest $100,000 in something that only pays out a few hundred? Lady Gaga did:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-fair-dos-a-million-spotify-streams-earned-gaga-167/

You can't run a business like that. Sooner or later they will turn off the lights, your employees will get tired of their pay checks bouncing and your mortgage company will foreclose on you.

So if you consider wanting to make enough to at least pay your bills "greed," color me greedy.

and it will doubtless use the rest of 2010 to look at how sites like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times fare before deciding on specifics

The WSJ online has more than 1 million paying subscribers.

It is arguably the oldest anf most successful example of pay-for-news-content on the Internet. WSJ Online Expanded Pay Plans Include Bundles, Micropayments

Here's a link to some more coverage - a couple more details about what they're planning.

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-netflix-to-take-its-streaming-business-international-next-year/

I used to think the same, I didn't believe in taking out a loan to buy something that's going to depreciate in value. However you can earn more investing money than what you'll save in interest. That is in a better economy, however in good tymes and bad tymes some companies pay dividends. PPG Industries has paid out dividends, 37 years in a row. The board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.53. It closed today at $55.15 a share. There are other companies like that who increase dividends every year.

Car loans are usually about 6%.

That depends. Bankrate is showing a dealer interest rate of 1.9% and credit union rates of 4.5%.

most people (myself excluded) don't buy cars based on solving their problem (need for transportation) for the least amount of money.

I've bought 7 vehicles, 6 used ones I paid for in cash, and the 7th was new I paid with a loan I got through the dealer. Of the 6 used ones, the longest one has lasted was about 3 years, and that was even though I rebuilt the engine in it. My new one I bought in 1999, almost 10 years ago, and I still have it.

Now I'm thinking of buying a used motorcycle.

Falcon

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-murdoch-sees-eventual-break-with-amazon-over-kindle-active-talks-with-s/
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/05/murdochs-ultimatum-to-amazon-give-us-the-names-or-else/

This is very disappointing...both because of the hyped-up /. summary and the overreaction of some of the media to his statements, made as a response to a question in a telephone news conference largely about News Corps.' financial side.

A former journalism teacher of mine prohibited the use of adjectives and to the word "I" outside quotation marks in news stories. Taking the /. summary as an example, we are left with nothing but a (relatively) reasonable quotation from someone (Murdoch) who has already spoken about this.

This summary is *wrong* on so many levels. It has severely overhyped the event and set up a straw man in that Murdoch speculated about asking Amazon for his subscribers' info but has not yet done so.

And where is /.'s moderation? How in the world did this ever get published on /.? Has /. become Digg?

designing software that would detect whether the text was copyrighted by AP or not would be prohibitively expensive.

Bullshit, this is what's stupid. AP already has a registry of copyrighted works. All the licensing software needs to do is search that registry. I have never had a computer that could not do searches, heck I've used the search built into my browser a number of tyme today.

I would also point out to everyone here that there is no defined word limit on what is and what is not fair use.

However AP is claiming more than 4 words, they not a court. Of course they wouldn't try to collect over a hand full of words, at least I don't think they would, because they'd get laughed out of court. I bet there isn't any 5 word string in what I'm typing now that has not been used a lot of tymes. Even if you include my spelling of time as "tyme".

Falcon

published.

Problem solved.

Then they can either hash the pasted text & try to find the source or they can require you to provide a citation.

My browser goes a pretty good job of searching text.

Either way, you don't want to do that client-side with javascript.

Agreed. But it should be simple to tie the licensing application to the registry. It may take a while to search through it, though search engines don't have a problem doing it, then if nothing else a license proposal can be emailed.

The answer to the first question in the FAQ linked to above, says it:
"A: Original news content such as that produced by AP and its members increasingly is being used across the Web without appropriate permission or compensation, and the problem is rapidly spreading to other digital applications. A content registry is a fundamental and powerful means to protect valuable and costly news content to assure that news organizations like AP can continue to support original journalism."

Falcon

The Associated Press collects articles from reporters all over the world. I doubt those reporters submit articles royalty-free. How does the AP tie licensed text back to the article it applies to?

The AP set up a news registry that should be able to do that. There's no reason they can't tie the system selling licenses to the registry. If the quote to be licensed isn't in the registry then they don't own the rights. If the quote is a word for word quote someone made that others could quote then it could be meta-tagged.

I have never heard of a news reporter earning royalties.

You're right but reporters can sell use rights. News organizations typically pay for first tyme usage but selling online as AP is doing is a violation of that. AP even created a registry "with a built-in rights framework that will provide AP and other content owners with tools that allow news organizations to grant and monitor specific usage rights associated with each piece of content."

Falcon

No. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
I completely agree with your point, but I believe the much more troubling lesson learned from the Radiohead example was that even when people could get it for free 100% legally, they still chose to download it illegally, which leads to the natural conclusion that people aren't even bothering to consider the price offered in the first place, going directly to P2P as their first port of call.
Going to your TV example, it would be like Store A offering free TVs to anybody who wants one, but people still going to Store B and stealing the same model TV. As I said, much more troubling that this is the society we live in.

Thanks for the info. i also found this by following links connected to your link,which talks about Google rolling out new ads which will take up the bottom 20% of the ENTIRE video clip. While I am sure that they will still get uploaders trying to cash in, I'm betting that to try to stop the bleeding they will end up with ads running pre roll,post roll,and with this overlay running the entire time. Which of course will run users off in droves,as nobody wants to sit through 30 second commercials just for a 1-5 minute clip. And then adding a stupid commercial sucking up the bottom 20% of the entire video is going to be distracting as hell,as they'll HAVE to make them flashy so your eyes will look down at the stupid thing.,

Which of course illustrates the problem with trying to support a video site through ads. because the folks are busy watching the video you're going to have to make the ads flashy and annoying just so you can drag folks eyes away from the video long enough to pay attention to your ads. Or you have to do like MSNBC and run the damned things before the content which I'm sure ends up with a lot of folks doing like I do and just killing the tab rather than watch the stupid ad. I would love to see the data from sites that run the ad before you can see the content just to see how many kill the site before actually getting to the content. I know watching my boys surf they do the same thing. If they have to see a 30 second ad just to see the clip they just don't bother.

The only video sites where I can see the ad model really working out would be the porn sites like Redtube. Since folks will keep watching the ads thanks to the sex in them,and they can tie the ads easily to the vids. Something like "Hey,you like that lesbian clip? We have the Debbie does the cheerleading squad on sale this week!". They can tie in with videos,toys,etc and I bet their click through rate is a whole lot better than anybody else. But considering the bandwidth required for something like Youtube,along with the server space,I just don't see how they will keep from irritating the hell out of users and still have the ads generate enough capital to pay the site's expenses. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

You're not the only one wondering. Investors are as well. Found this story called Youtube Ads Underperforming

Interesting, but gossip sites don't count as credible sources... but I do like the link the site provides http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-craigslist-poised-for-81-million-in-08-revenue-could-top-100-million-re/

This is assuming the 'classified intelligence' site is a credible source and the above linked site quoted correctly from them.

Maybe I've been too inclined to give Craig the benefit of the doubt, since he markets himself as a nonprofit dude. I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with making money, but once you make a lot of it, you should stick by your responsibilities to your customers.

It sold for $345 million last year, so sounds like a smart investment.

It should be noted he's not the CIO of EMI, he's the President of Digital Business. http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-interview-douglas-merrill-president-emi-digital-business/ http://www.emigroup.com/Press/2008/press40.htm

It appears to be part of a larger layoff/reorganization at CBS Interactive

Yahoo's been down this route before. They had Yahoo! Financevision which they shut down in 2002. I guess we really are going full-circle.

This page dated in 2003 shows that Google has been planning this for quite awhile. I wonder what took them so long?

it isn't dead, i used it just yesterday

I thought the same, but GP is right, it was bought by CNET and now forwards to tv.com. You got another URL?

IMDB is very comprehensive if you're after TV show cast info. In the UK, there's always TV Cream...

J,

Forget about Fred. You best focus on figuring out the portents of this:

http://www.michaelbuffington.com/archives/2005/02/ the_grand_expir.html

Key excerpt:

[Michael's blog entry here]

-----

So what is to prevent him, or me, or anybody, from setting up a Weblogsinc-style collection of blogs and arb...er, ad-bitraging away most of your $600/day?

Pretty much nothing, I reckon.

Thoughts?

------

Let's see what he says...

Also, here's the link to my comment: http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/123400086003 1229/#c124683)

And here's the link to my source for the $600/day stat:

http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2005_02_09.shtm l#012219

Netherlands - NOS offers 4 channels of preprogramed content and 1 live feed.
UK - live video simulcast from television
Sweden - live video simulcast from television
USA - NBC offers only highlights

Sources: Wired, Paid Content, Kamera

Disclaimer: I work for the beeb, but all views expressed here are my own

You should not be so cynical. The BBC is the world's leading broadcaster and this is definitely going to happen, the trial is to look at the specific technologies involved, the beeb already knows this is feasible. Ashley Highfield gave a very interesting interview to padContent.org a while back, the most telling quote from which, for me, was "We need to help consumers leap-frog the illegal downloading issues that have wrecked havoc on the music industry."

for the lazy: the link