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Universal Offers iPod-Resistant Music
dprovine writes "Universal is now offering music through Spiral Frog as free downloads supported by advertising revenue. But according to Daily Tech, the files being offered won't work on iPods. 'The move to not allow its content to be played on iPod's appears to be a clear snub by the Universal Music Group, similar to NBC's recent move of its television content from iTunes to Amazon.com. Apple has not commented on this development. For many, though, SpiralFrog.com presents an intriguing new business model that may present a legal alternative to file sharing or spending large amounts of money on CDs or paid download services, such as iTunes.'"
or less.
come on. let's get real here.
universal is gonna get owned.
How can it not work on an iPod?
MP3 is a clearly defined standard. These files either are, or they aren't, mp3's. If they are, iPods will play them. If they aren't, then they shouldn't be sold as MP3's.
sig?
This is a great service. Well, it's great as long as you only listen to music sitting in front of your computer. And don't use a Mac. Or Linux. And don't mind paying for music that may one day dissapear because the service has been discontinued or you move to a Mac or Linux.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Now Universal just look like idiots. One can easily argue the business sense of delivering content in a price-controllable way. Business 101 - when the demand increases, limit the supply and profit by increasing the prices, or changing the delivery mechanism to make more money on the same supply. Demand for downloadable music has increased while CD sales decreased, thus the allegory.
The stupid part of this idea is removing 70-80% (the share of iPods in the portable music market) of the market for your product. Just try to buy a gas station and switch to only selling ethanol and see how well that works if you need an example. The phrase shooting one's self in the foot comes to mind, but the recording studios seem good at that.
We see the rise of another doomed business.
Of course it won't work on iPods, they're using DRM-out-the-ass WMA files that won't work on any OS but windows and players made by companies that bought into the Plays for Sure nonsense that not even Microsoft themselves use.
So it's free, so what. You get a combination of advertising and no control. I'll stick to my usual of buying CDs and ripping them to AAC, even if it means less music overall.
The music industry really baffles me. First of all, what average consumer really knows which label their favorite bands are with? I'm sure most people are like me, and really don't care which band is with who. And when these labels start fragmenting how consumers are able to get music, it will just confuse the consumer, and just push them towards piracy.
I once dated a guy who worked for Universal in their licensing department. I guarantee you Universal doesn't understand that the average consumer has no idea what label an artist is on. When you work for a company like Universal you hear these entertainment names constantly, and it gets hard to separate that constant work related input from what you know about an entertainer from the non-work world.
In the end Universal is crippling itself. This isn't new for Universal. They were one of the last studios to begin moving their film archive onto DVD, they also just released DVD's with out even so much as a menu (ie, zero special features) you put the disk in, watched a couple previews you didn't want to watch, and then the movie started.
Universal is a company that has consistently put out the absolute minimum in frills, done the least possible it could in order to sell the item, all the while charging a premium for the DVD. This goes for Movies, and now more recently for Music. In the end they want to charge the CD price premium without providing the CD level quality. Apple won't let them screw their customers like that and so Universal is cutting off it's own nose to spite it's own face.
In the end we can live without the labels, and unfortunately Universal hasn't learned that fact yet. There'll always be great music out there, with or without them.
According to this article iTunes now is the third largest music retailer with 10% of the market (Wal-mart at #1 has 15% of the market.) Considering that Apple has nearly 90% of the digital music players market, Universal's attempt to move it's catalog onto Amazon (which is ranked #4 in the US for music retail) may have been an ill thought out strategic move when matched with the fact that the files only coming in (non-iPod supported) WMA format. In this case it appears that Universal has overestimated audience demand for their music library. Screwing yourself out of 10% total music sales in the US could easily result in Universal not seeing another artist enter the top 10 sales lists until the iTunes boycott ends. Most of todays generic corporate created artists lack any sort of long term market draw or memorability without the corporate backed marketing and chart positions generated by sales. That is the significance of Universal's ill thought out strategy to force Apple's hand.
I could also go off onto a tangent regarding Malcolm McDowell's Tipping Point and how the "cool kids" likely to cause a tipping point effect for an artist are probably the "cool kids" who of course own iPods. An artist without the "cool kids" support is going to find him/herself increasingly less relevant to mainstream consumers. This of course is a harder idea to support with actual numbers, for me it's just a gut feeling that this decision is going to have that sort of anti-cool impact that could result in the wrong kind of "tipping point" (ie, people abandoning an artist.)
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.