Musicnet Fails to Impress Customers

mcwop writes "A Wall Street Journal story carried on MSNBC chronicles MusicNet's failure as a service before it even gets started. The story contains some funny quotes such as: 'The first offering was too clunky and too consumer unfriendly to hold much hope for its success, says Richard Parsons, AOL Time Warner's incoming chief executive. So we are going to go back, and we will come out with a 2.0 product which will be more consumer friendly, easy to use. ... This is a business of trial and error.' Any consumer could have informed the music titans that their business plan was flawed. Unfortunately, version 2.0 won't be any better unless the music industry is willing to take some risks. One of the more interesting aspects to the story is how the major music companies could hardly be present in the same room for fear that antitrust laws may be broken." A good business-oriented review of Musicnet's operations. With the artists making a quarter-cent per downloaded song, they're probably just as happy to see it fail.