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Liquid Audio: Better off dead?
mgeneral writes "It seems so for the shareholders.
Liquid Audio, had only $150,000 in revenue but managed to lose $5.6 million last quarter. Its main asset: A pile of cash. In fact, so much cash, that if they close the doors, they could pay back the shareholders more per share than the current stockprice...and thats exactly what some investors want them to do." We've run stories on Liquid Audio before...
a company that has the chance to close its doors and distribute a profit, or try to merge with another company and become yet another hybrid company that will be quickly forgotten. I would think that the obvious choice would be to just dissolve the company and take the profit. They really don't offer anything unique to the market that is worth building a business on.
Especially they use a proprietary format. When I buy music, I wanna listen to it other than on the computer. Otherwise, might as well buy the real CD or logon Kazaa.
And their selection is narrow. Marketing is not enough. So they're unheard to customers, unwise to computer geeks, and unliked to shareholders. It's time to give up and move on.
Oh yea...and the so called "resurrection" of Napster is as hopeful as the Atari or NeXT.
From what I can tell, the only thing they had over things like Ogg Vorbis, and even MP3 is that they were there before those formats were as popular (or even existed in the case of vorbis).
Their main competitor was Real, but Real were interested in low bitrate streaming, and Liquid were interested in digital distribution of high quality music.
Then along came MP3, and people got free (if not necesarily legal) distribution of acceptable quality music, and so Liquid became irrelevant.
Real survives because there's still a market for live streaming audio technology.
Advanced users are users too!
Yes. "Cash" in business-speak means any easily liquefiable investments, usually short-term stuff like commercial paper or even long-term stuff which is easy to liquidate like T-bills. It doesn't mean greenbacks, and most of it usually isn't kept in bank accounts either.
The Liquid Audio files are fully Digital Rights Managed, I have one on my harddisk that I can no longer listen to, caues something changed on my computer.
The song sucked anyway, but the ammount of hassle it took to get the player installed (along with some funky sound card drivers (I think they are installed to try to keep listeners from playing to the harddisk instead of speakers) was increadable.
I'll never get another song in that format.
what are the technical leverages that Liquid Audio claims to offer vs. free competitors such as Ogg Vorbis
Pretty much just DRM, which means the music industry was happy to use it in promos for new releases, etc.
Get off my launchpad!