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Google Shies Away from Digital Music Sales
mytrip writes to tell us that Google has announced that they will not be getting in on the digital music sales market anytime soon. Analysts have been predicting the response of a "GTunes" service for months but Chris Sacca, head of business development at Google, dispelled those rumors in a recent address at the annual National Association of Recording Merchandisers conference in Florida. Sacca emphasized the need for "ecosystem development" and partnerships within the industry stating that they were the "big opportunity" in the digital music business.
Stop wasting time!
ext:mp3
That's called selling advertising (to commercial customers), it has nothing to do with selling content to consumers, retail-style.
Wrong direction. Payola means the record companies pay radio stations for preferential treatment to play the record companies' music. Licensing means the radio stations pay ASCAP/BMI for the right to broadcast ASCAP/BMI members' music. Payola is illegal; licensing is legal.
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You are confusing two separate issues.
The fact remains (and this is something that many internet bitcasters can't wrap their brains around) that the average radio station pays millions of dollars each year to play music. Even if you're a crappy three kilowatt FM in some medium market, your licensing fee is going to run about a million dollars a year (Could have changed, it's been a few years since I was involved in this).
People on the internet like to pretend that radio stations get their music for free. Yes, the record companies send them free CDs, but the radio stations still have to pay for playing them on the air. And in many cases, even small stations don't rely on free CDs from the record companies any more. They subscribe to libraries of what are essentially mix CDs full of music tailored to their audience. That's another service they pay for.
I got out of radio several years ago, so I can only imagine what internet delivery of playlists has done to all of this. But one thing I'm sure of -- radio stations aren't playing music for free.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
On the contrary, they stick fairly close to their core competency compared to certain other tech companies. Plus, I'd hardly call what they're doing "overextending" when they have a $100 billion market capitalization.
That they deny being enticed by the idea of selling music online is a good sign IMO, it means they don't need to try to grab a piece of every pie that has anything to do with the word "Internet".
Thank you for an entertaining thread. I will not read any further USENET-quoted replies. (Why is it that letter-writers never have to insert large chunks of the letter to which they are replying, implying that they're carrying on a conversation in real time? Seems a little crazy to me.)
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It is almost as if you didn't hear about the Google Store, You can buy google lava lamps, google gum, google shirts, yep http://www.googlestore.com/
Google doesn't index them anymore. Afaics they stopped over a year ago. I've done an experiment creating multiple sites with good content and uniquely keyworded .mp3 files as immediate leaf nodes. (The files are legal content owned by myself) 9 months later, nothing, nada, zitch, completely and absolutely jack on Google.
The logs show the Google spider hitting them, scores of times.
I leave the speculation to the reader, but those are the facts.
More than 70 or 80% of all the ext:mp3 references that Google does link to are dead.