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."

Comments

The question becomes

[smaug195]

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.

Re:what bubble?

[the uNF cola]

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.

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 .com era.

Yeah, reminds me of the good old days.

[aclarke]

At the company I used to work for we built a prefab online CD sales store in 1999. I think our client got around 60 clients running the site before they went belly up. It was a fun project - all the sites were run off a single data/code base with a syndicated industry information populating templates so each site had the same content but looked completely different.

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.

Re:Remember Netscape?

[Unoti]

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.

Re:What?

[Lev13than]

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.