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Off-The-Shelf Online Music Stores
jpkunst writes "The Chicago Sun-Times and C|Net news.com report about a new product from Loudeye Digital Media Solutions and Microsoft: pre-fab online music stores for companies who want to join the digital music goldrush. I wonder when this bubble is going to burst."
until artists start making decent music. the business is going nowhere.
Yeah who would ever want to buy music online. Oh wait a minute...
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
When will there be a player that supports all these music services. The iPod supports iTunes, theres a napster player that supports napster, I'm not even sure about the WMA's. I think iTunes will remain the dominant store just on virtue of iPod sales alone.
Perhaps, like the dotcom boom, the Internet music "boom" will actually be a whimper. Apples seems to be the only group that has thus far broken the sound barrier. Microsoft is just playing the catch-up game that they accuse others of playing.
Big difference is, apple can afford to do this. As apple has said, they want to make money for other devices that are promoted by the tunes-store.
.com era.
And it's true, it is a bubble. Most fell down -- emusic and a few others tried to do what iTunes is doing now. Now napster 2 and all these other ones are coming out. Eventually, they'll all go away except for a few successful ones.
The same thing happened with housing, a bubble of people buying off of cheap loans on expensive houses, and now there are a lot of people declaring bancruptcy (s?).
Same thing happened in the
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"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
But back to business ideas: it seems the first wave was taking an existing idea (music stores) and putting "internet" in front of it. Now the idea is taking an existing "internet" idea (online music stores) and making it "digital" (digital online music store).
Go figure.
www.clarke.ca
but there are some e-commerce enterprises making money: Yahoo and EBay, for example.
Maybe the creation of new services will level off once the traditional music distribution system is eliminated or rationalized.
Yeah, but Microsoft plays a pretty mean game of catch-up.
Witness: the internet. Back in the day, Microsoft was promoting MSN as a non-internet alternative. TCP/IP wasn't even in Windows. Once they saw that the networking was going IP, they played catch-up pretty well.
Witness: Internet Explorer. Netscape was dominating the browser market for a long time. When Internet Explorer came out, it was terrible technologically. Microsoft was playing catch-up. It seemed ridiculous for Microsoft, this upstart in the internet world, to try to take on Netscape. Netscape had a huge lead.
Ok, someone please explain to me why anyone would want to have a cloned music store? What value is added? What are the licensees bringing to the table?
Customer segmentation. If your website is devoted to, say, West Coast Christian hiphop-jazz fusion and you already attract fan traffic to your site, you can gain an addition revenue stream by offering a wide selection of West Coast Christian hiphop-jazz fusion music. Since you can offer this without any investment in infrastructure, it's money in the bank. The provider is happy becuase they don't need to spend much to get you up and running, so they can increase sales through an aggregator model of boutique stores.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
This is very similar to a story a few days ago about Destra Music, the first online music retailer in Australia. Destra turns out to not really be a retailer: when you visit their site, it asks you to select from 9 familiar bricks n' mortar retailers. Then you're taken to that retailer's "store," which is identical to the other 8 retailers' stores except for the logo and theme colours. That is, instead of a single ITMS or Amazon-style store, we have 9 cloned, prefab stores.
What benefit does this hold for the consumer? The only one I can think of is that people who have particularly warm fuzzy feelings about one of these retailers can choose them over the others.
The real reason behind it, I suspect, is channel management. The record industry doesn't want to upset the retailers, so they're helping them remain at the cyber-storefront -- even though the retailers have no expertise (or real interest) in online sales, and nothing to offer of any benefit besides a logo.
The Destra Music site is awful -- it looks like a 16-year-old kid whipped it up in his lunch break. And it will probably stay awful, because none of these 9 retailers have any incentive to improve it -- why bother, when your competitors are using the same software?
Prefabricated music stores might work out well for LoudEye, just like Cisco did pretty well out of the tech bubble. But the consumer doesn't need a proliferation of near-identical stores.
I should buy some cement.
It seems strange that Microsoft is trying to "help" other companies produce online music stores, rather than starting its own. They've never really been afraid to compete, particularly when they have a strong hand to play. So what's the up side of this for Microsoft? Does it help them mitigate their risk in a new market? Is it that they figure that lots of music stores are going to pop up one way or another, and they want a piece of all of 'em? Are they trying to keep a low profile to avoid more antitrust litigation?
In short, why has Microsoft decided to share this pie rather than take the whole thing?
You hit the nail on the head. I predict we will be seeing a lot of specialty services popping up very VERY soon. What I'm wondering though is if I want to use this service with multiple sites, will I have to download new software for each separate site? Or will it just be a front end, and load each sites music catalogue when I need it?
Also, I think this sort of thing would be great for local/college radio stations that play a lot of local bands and such. Imagine a radio station where you can listen to the new local music, then hop on their service and purchase it right away. Does anybody know of any free services that currently do this? Where you can listen to a net radio station, and if you like a song, click a button and it downloads instantly?
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Thats not catchup. That is just monopoly. If Microsoft didn't have Windows installed on 90+% of machines do you still think they would of 'caught up' with netscape?
Well, the default installs probably helped a lot, in that it got a lot of people testing IE, which gave MS a lot of feedback. But there's no denying that there was a definite point where IE became undeniably superior to Netscape. By version 4 IE had taken the technological lead, and when IE5 came out it left Netscape 4.x far behind.
If IE had stagnated at version 4 and been content to match Netscape featurewise, Netscape probably wouldv'e maintained a significant marketshare. But even if IE hadn't been installed by default, by the time IE5 rolled out people would've been downloading it *instead* of Netscape, simply because Netscape 4.x was really weak by comparison.
Netscape dropped the ball. IE kicked ass fair and square. For what purpose, it's hard to say, because in the end it really didn't buy MS that much to have won the browser war. What's the point of fighting over a free product? Just to get MSN as the default home page?
Anyway, without IE in competition, it's unlikely that Netscape would've become Mozilla, and we'd probably be years behind where we are now with standards compliance (HTML, XHTML, CSS, etc). It was a good thing. Done for all the wrong reasons by a loathsome company, but beneficial to most of us in the end.
But soon they will be able to say there are 9785+ competing online music stores selling WMA music versus just one place to get your AAC music. This will make a good sound bite. Even though all these are just MS shell companies and as soon as the profit is there MS will bring them into the fold. In the meantime everyone else gets to bear the risks, spend themarketing dollars. MS just collects checks.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It will be interesting to see if this ever happens again.
It was tried in the past. A system called Personics was once available for this. You'd go into your local Sam Goody store and browse through songs at a listening station, writing down track numbers for whatever you wanted. Then you'd give the list to a clerk, who would quickly make a cassette with your mix. Tapes were pretty inexpensive - about $10 for an 8-song tape, IIRC.
I thought it was a great idea. I made several such tapes. But it obviously was not a financial success, since it's gone and there is no successor taking its place.
When you have to divide it by 362 million shares, and the only number most investors will ever look at is EPS. Keep in mind that's probably pre-tax so it goes to ~$850,000. However if apple made about $50 million pre-tax selling iPods (not too unimaginable given $230 million in revenue since iTMS launched) that isn't a bad return on their investment.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Ummmm, no. IIRC, Apple makes 40 cents. The record company makes 60, and out of that 60, 5 goes to the rights holder / musician.
HW
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.