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AOL: Amazon Who?
theodp writes "America Online said that it is now selling DVDs and CDs directly as part of its push into digital music, ending a temporary link it had with Amazon.com until it was able to do so itself. The step to sell physical CDs and DVDs is part of AOL's efforts to get a bigger share of the digital music pie to offset shrinkage in its dial-up Internet service and the slump in ad spending. AOL plans to build on its music offerings, which now include online music subscription service MusicNet, with a digital music store that will let users burn as many songs to CDs as they want."
"We need a way to boost our profits now that everyone is dropping our worthless service and getting cable and DSL. Hmmm... I know! We'll sell music! Now that Napster is gone, we don't have to worry about piracy anymore. Wait 'till our stockholders hear this! This is almost as great as my idea for AOL Airlines."
Such a sad day for the company. They just lost an agreement with the biggest CD distributor in the country.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
With the labels and the studios getting more and more involved in distributing directly to the customer, is this signalling the end for the middle men?
:o)
People like Amazon will have a hard time selling music if everything from AOL Time Warner and Sony (for example) is only available direct. After all in the online space AOL TW has absolutley no need of Amazon - they are a big enough brand that people will be happy enough to buy things from them, and location is not an issue.
Unfortunatly I can't see the removal of the cut that the middle man gets going to the consumer or even the artist.
It'll be a good things for us geeks on a digital boycott of DRM enabled media however - you won't have to go looking to find out which ones are AOL TW productions, you can just avoid shopping at their e-store
Beep beep.
The first step is to sell CDs directly without Amazon.
The second step will be when Amazon's name mysteriously disappears from AOLs DNS servers.
Third? The lengthy court battle...
It story seems to me very similar to the history of Mircosoft:a single company with a proprietary, incompatible products steadily increased their market share by aggressive advertisement until they became the dominant monopolist.
Don't be fooled by the fact that AOL is just a service provider. If they control over 70 percent of the internet access of private customers all players in the network business would have to follow their word and do their bidding. They could dominate standards bodies and in fact enforce proprietary standards locked by IP and patents on the whole internet.
This makes me wonder if it's now time for a GPL service provider. By following the principles of the free software movement, they could set up free WIFI access to the internet. This would have the nice side effect that the US goverment won't be able to censor the internet any longer. Furthermore we might get all free broadband access without paying huge fees to greedy companies which do nothing for the community.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I realize they're talking about buying CDs and DVDs, but eventually they'll have to move it into Internet downloads like Apple's iTMS.
:)
Obviously they're use some type of DRM (most likely developed by their A/V gurus at Nullsoft....Frankel'll love that one), but once an AOL user leaves the collective will they still get to take their music with them or will they require AOL for the rest of their adult life?
That it, until they lose another $99,000,000,000 this year and are forced out of business
Or maybe just set up a playlist they can stream off the order status page of whatever they ordered. Once the order is fulfilled the playlist can go away along with the order page.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Why not just offer free streaming music of the entire TimeWarner collection of artists to AOL users? Seems like a decent way to attract customers.
AOL does own the following artists' works: Frank Sinatra, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, James Taylor, The Grateful Dead, Talking Heads, B-52s, Doobie Brothers, Little Feat, Van Morrison, The Ramones, Depeche Mode, The Kinks, Paul Simon, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Miles Davis, Randy Newman, Dire Straits, Prince, Emmylou Harris, Madonna, Linkin Park, Enya, Faith Hill, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty, R.E.M., Disturbed, Goo Goo Dolls, Blake Shelton, Trick Pony, Seal, Green Day, Sixpence None The Richer, Steely Dan, Josh Groban, The Flaming Lips, Jaheim, SK, D'Mello, Souljahz, Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny, Robert Randolph, The Used, Glassjaw, and Barenaked Ladies; as well as thousands of others.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
It will be interesting to see if they are around in five years.
AOL, one of the largest (and arguably hoariest) national internet service providers around, is losing business because of some questionable business practices and needs to generate more revenue.
In order to do this, they've severed ties with a prominent internet business (Amazon) and are going to attempt to run their own physical media music store...
Excuse me? Where's the sense in this?? If you have a business model that's doing poorly, you are not supposed to tack on another business model that's also doing poorly! If the problem is too much fat, the solution is not to tack more on.
As someone at Adbusters said, "Economists must learn to subtract." While the specific application is different in this case, the basic principle holds true for most businessmen, accountants, and marketers who can only think of "bigger" and "more profitable" and not "streamlined" and "more responsible."
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
I bought Less Than Jake's new CD called Anthem in a prerelease special. Buying direct from the record company gave me the bonus of having it [supposedly] autographed by all five members of the band, but guess what else? It was copy protected.
or a more legal method might be to secretly slow down all traffic to amazon.com from AOL's Walled Garden. How would anyone find out? Amazon.com still works; it's just twice as slow.
cpeterso