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Napster On the Block
Ars Technica has a good wrap of
Napster hanging out a "For Sale or Partner" sign. With half a million subscribers (down from the previous quarter) and $100M in annual revenue, the company is still bleeding cash. El Reg pinpoints the trouble: "The subscription crowd – and Apple via iTunes – must fight over a few pennies per song in profit. More from the Vulture: "You have to wonder if Napster's customer base is really worth the effort for a company such as Microsoft or even Real. The Napster brand has all the gravitas of a Che Guevara t-shirt."
Way back when the Napster brand was bought for a buttload of cash, I said it was a bad buy. The buyers thought the brand strength and name recognition would turn into cash when they rolled out a for-pay music service. But the people who used Napster to share music had moved on to Kazaa, Morpheus, and new ones when those got nailed or started barfing up spyware.
When Napster was finally re-rolled out as a subscription service, all of its fans had moved on. There was some advantage to the name recognition, but overall it had lost its chic, its cool, and its cred. It was now a bunch of suits wearing the hip little cat head and everyone knew it. The users who "made" Napster were either illegally sharing via different apps, were buying off iTunes, or were going to hold the new Napster service up to pinpoint scrutiny like an ant under a magnifying glass.
The term "irrational exhuberance" comes to mind. The people who bought the brand and built the new service got a lot of things, but didn't get *it*. Branding the service with the Napster name, while creating a certain amount of buzzz, also brought with it a certain amount of baggage, sets of varying expectations that would be hard to meet. And their declining numbers and murmurs of selling the business just go to prove that this was a bad idea that was not well-executed.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Maybe the Che Guevera reference was to show that only idiots who don't know what they're talking about use it, much like the twats who wear Che Guevera shirts?
Q: I've heard a lot about "business models", can you show me an example of a good one?
A: Certainly! A good business model is one where you provide a service without charging any money. For example, the original Napster would be an example. They did lots of research and development into their "file sharing" product, and co-opted the work of artists across the world to produce a product that people would want to use. How did they make a profit without charging anything? Answer: Volume!
Q: Ok, so can you give me an example of a bad business model
A: Sure. Just look at the music industry. They provide products (boo!) that people want, and sell these products to them.
Q: My gosh! How can they possibly survive with that model? Surely you profit more from giving everything away for free than you do by selling things
A: Quite right. This is why the music industry is unable to make a profit. Napster and other supporters of "sharing" have done what they can to change this around to no avail, even forcing the music industry to participate by, essentially, giving away their music. But for some reason, they don't like this, and keep running to the courts to tell people to stop!
Q: OMG! That sounds positively like a protection racket or extortion or something!
A: You betcha! Tehse... I mean these people are positively evil. They get their kicks funding the creation of new music and then charging people who want to own copies of it. Can you believe it?
(...and so on...)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Now they know...what it's like to be on the artist's end of the contract.
That's the problem. Both the artist *and* the retailer get shafted (see: the recent collapse of Tower Records). The only people making money on this whole game are the labels.
In fact, Weird Al recently pointed out that he, personally gets *less* from an iTunes sale than he does from a CD sale, thanks to his contract's "New Technology" clause. So even though the label's costs are *lower* for iTunes sales, they're making more, and *taking* more from the artist.
The middlemen get everything. The retailers and the artists get nothing.
From Wikipedia:
_ Human_Development_Index#endnote_2
An HDI 0.8 or more is considered to represent high development. This includes countries of northern and western Europe, North America, Republic of China (Taiwan), Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, the Southern Cone, Israel, Kuwait and the UAE. Other countries that exhibit high human development amidst countries with lower HDIs include (with their position) Costa Rica (47th), Cuba (52nd), Mexico (53rd) and Panama (56th).
Go check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
Also, obviously they are way better than the US in public health, and also in education, judging by assholes like you.
Get your act toghether before you post.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Compared to where?
If you measure by "living through infancy", then compared to the United States. Cuba has a lower per-capita infant mortality than the US. Sad but true.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.