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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.
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
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.
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.
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
They're helping because they want to push WMA to as many services as possible. They don't care who wins, just as long as the winner is using their DRM.
Also, Microsoft has never been a company that jumps into an emerging market. Their behaviour is down to a science:
1) wait for an emerging market to mature and for the major players to drift up to the top
2) offer to buy the largest player at slightly less than they're worth
3) if they refuse, put hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a competing service or product.
They did it with browsers, game consoles, webmail, you name it. Microsoft will do what they do best -- sit back and wait and then throw their money at the best bet. They call this "innovation."