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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."
All this fuss around online music sales is becoming to look much like dotcom bubble to me...
-- grmbl woz heer
The bubble will burst when everyone realizes that they are not making any money from this (just like the old dot coms). It is well documented, for example, that Apple makes little to no profit off of iTunes; all the profit comes from sales of iPods.
Microsoft is rumored to be offering some kind of an Itunes clone next year. But to sell OTHER PEOPLE music storefronts - that's one way to make some money... at least in the short run.
Loudeye and Microsoft Enable Branded Digital Music Stores and Services.
Loudeye has teamed with Microsoft to enable the rapid deployment of third party branded digital music stores and services. By combining Windows Media 9 Series with Loudeye's private labeled products and services, companies can rapidly launch a customized digital music store or service for a fraction of the cost of building a solution in house. Microsoft and Loudeye are working with AT&T Wireless, Gibson Audio and others.
Read more about our digital music collaboration with Microsoft, our recently announced branded music products, or contact Loudeye sales directly at 877.502.5488 or email salesteam@loudeye.com to begin your digital music business.
The Loudeye Digital Music Store is a customer-branded, turnkey solution designed for any online business to extend their brand, increase sales, retain customers and differentiate themselves in the marketplace by capitalizing on the popularity of digital music.
Next year, AT&T Wireless plans to be the first wireless carrier in North America to introduce a compelling mobile music offer utilizing Loudeye services and the Windows Media 9 Series platform. The company plans to integrate the online music store experience with all of AT&T Wireless' mMode(TM) capable phones, including the Motorola MPX200 Smartphone, enabling mobile users to discover and purchase music ranging from ringtones to full-length songs.
"As technologies advance and converge, the wireless phone will become the next major platform for music content delivery, and AT&T Wireless will be at the forefront this transformation," said John Bunyan, senior vice president of consumer data offers at AT&T Wireless. "Working with industry leaders like Loudeye and Microsoft, we will ensure it's easy and fun for customers to discover, experience, share, and buy music, while on the move."
The Loudeye Digital Music Store represents the integration of all the components necessary to create, promote and operate a digital music store online from a single company. The Loudeye Digital Music Store can quickly help businesses promote, sell music and leverage cross merchandising opportunities.
The Loudeye Digital Music Store offers the following features:
* Digital music download delivery
* Branded players to provide both live and on-demand audio and video content to end users
* Digital rights management using Windows Media DRM
* Usage reporting and analytics
* Digital music royalty settlement
* Streaming music samples and cover art
* Music metadata
* Rich media ringtunes
The Loudeye iRadio Service offers 100 channels of pre-programmed music delivered through a customer-branded player interface and capable of supporting delivery to a range of consumer music devices and appliances. The iRadio service can be deployed online for retailers, portals and other content companies as well as offline for consumer electronic devices and appliances, digital home entertainment systems and other digital broadcasting outlets.
"Because Gibson is new to consumer electronics, we wanted to make a statement by designing the most comprehensive digital music solution on the market, which for us meant including a powerful digital music service," said Kris Carter, President of Gibson Audio. "Loudeye gave us the ability to give the Wurlitzer Digital Jukebox a full featured digital music service in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, it would have taken to develop ourselves."
Both products are built on the Loudeye Media Framework, a complete set of technologies and applications leveraging Loudeye's 6 years of industry experience and $60 million infrastructure investment. The Media Framework is designed to support business models including wireless ringtones, music samples, branded media players, consumer music appliances, Internet radio and digital music downloads.
-- grmbl woz heer
The term 'trojan' goes all the way back to the horse presented to the people of Troy as a present but was a sneeky Greek attack (a brief history here). A Trojan in the true sense refers to this, so I suppose the parent was referring to iTunes being a sneak ploy to get people to use iPod.
Not that the 'hacker colloqualism' of trojan horse is a misuse, it is not, but to see this as the primary source is just wrong.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.