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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."
when will what bubble burst? best i can remember is that apple's barely making any money at all off the actual music sales, let alone all the companies following
It'll burst when someone creates a non-RIAA internet radio station / distribution hub. Unsigned artists submit their music to the site, a group of public moderators give the music good/bad karma and the good stuff gets streamed to millions of PCs. Users can download the stuff that they like with a simple click and yet another simple click burns it to CD or moves it to the player.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
"I wonder when this bubble is going to burst."
I'm predicting 2004, second quarter.
Of course, I'm a software developer, so I don't know squat.
This space for rent.
I'm looking forward to it.
Now for the love of god, someone buy an iTunes Music store and start selling me the music in Canada!
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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.
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
Yeah, next they'll try putting water in bottles, and expect THAT to sell!
Given the alternatives (mp3 on Kazaa, aac on the iPod) already out there, who is really going to choose to buy their music in .wma format?? I just don't see this really taking off with public. It's a case of too little too late, and trying to copy the iTMS model without really offering anything compelling.
If you want to really be inspired, read this article from Rolling Stone where they interviewed Steve Jobs, who knows how to do this the right way...
Apple will be the only online music store to survive. Apple makes no profit, so nobody can compete on price points and make a profit. If you charge more people will go to apple instead. Either way, you go bankrupt while apple sells iPods.
btw, i use iTunes for the 1st time today, so it's not 25,000,001 songs downloaded.
Maybe Apple doesn't make any money on their music store. But the record companies basically get a free distribution system and extra profit at no expense. Money IS being made from this.
When Wal-Mart decided to open their own online music service, I started getting skittish. Now I'm positive the whole thing will collapse when any of the following entities announce the creation of their own online music store:
* K-Mart
* Home Depot
* The Municipal Government of Topeka, Kansas
* Richard Stallman
* The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
* Satan
* Hormel Foods
* Gary Coleman
* Rick and Linda's Bait Shop and Outboard Motor Repair (Jump of I-75 at exit 215B, then head north seven miles to the lake. Can't miss it.)
If you see any of these, it's time to sell short.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Another person confusing copyright infringement and theft. *sigh*. If I take your gas and don't pay for it, you don't have the gas to sell to another customer. If I create gas out of thin air that is completely identical to your gas for my own use, you still have your gas to sell and nobody is missing anything. Sharing is GOOD. For Pete's sake, the only people that are against sharing are fscked up RIAA lapdogs who must've been the ones running home to mommy when other kids asked to play with their toys. Selfish pricks.
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.
the person who gets rich during the Gold ruch isn't the miners, it's the guy selling shovels.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But I WILL NOT share my girlfriend. You can copy her all you want though.
One caution, especially for those considering using this service. Loudeye are the guys who screwed the pooch for the MIT LAMP system by selling material that they did not have the right to actually sell.
Quick backstory: MIT bought MP3s on hard drives from Loudeye to broadcast over MIT cable channels, which they have an ASCAP liscense for. Before the purchase, MIT asked Loudeye to verify that they could in fact sell MIT the music for this purpose. Loudeye indicated that they had the rights.
Of course, they day the system launched, the RIAA sat up and began complaining that Loudeye actually had no such rights.
Yeah. The lesson here? Always save the receipts...
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?
Yes, it's going to be a golden age for the repo business. One which shall never end.
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Let's start a company where we get bands to sign up to giant loans at extortionate rates that we then spend on their behalf by deliberately choosing really crap distribution models that involve shipping slivers of acrylic all over the world. If anyone comes up with a parallel path for musicians, we'll use our artists money to lobby, sue and legislate them out of existence.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
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.
livephish.com has supposedly been profitable from day one. another site with a similiar model has recently emerged -- www.digitalsoundboard.net three hours of FLAC for $13. wonder when their bubble will burst.