Why AnywhereCD Failed

An anonymous reader writes "In an obituary for AnywhereCD, which closes in one week, founder (and MP3.com founder) Michael Robertson chronicles how at least one record label wanted him to embed credit card numbers of buyers into songs. A fascinating story about how at least some of the labels still don't get it and why AnywhereCD is about to be buried."

Comments

Re:FTA

[User 956]

"I believe that if you give people real value (music or anything else) they are happy to pay."

I believe that if the RIAA members were in the business of giving people anything of real value, there would not exist an RIAA.

The music industry sucks

[mlwmohawk]

Sorry, no one is addressing the real problems:

The music sucks. Maybe one good song on an album.
Little girls who can't sing dancing on stage with no cloths
Utter and complete pathological need to control the content
contempt for their customers
Failure to recognize that people like music on CDs, MP3 playes, and their computers and don't want to pay three times.

Re:All about control

[gfxguy]

And they are going to wonder why sales drop further as they pick one form of DRM that many players can't handle.

So they'll sell DRM WMA files and lose all the iPod users, or they'll sell AC4 and lose all the "Windows" compatible players.

AND

They'll piss off people who don't want to go to fifty different sights trying to hunt down the music they want.

And then they'll blame piracy for slow sales.

Re:All about control

[king-manic]

And this is where the music industry as it stands fails to see the logical end to their model: If it is more profitable for them to pull out of an aggregating portal site and run their own, then what's to prevent artists from doing the same? Why should artists remain with them in this scenario? Artists could, gasp, make their own deals with iTunes or the like. Odds are that artists will wind up with agents that manage that for them in return for a fee.

At the moment the Labels still have control over traditional media. So While you could theoretically make a living via web distribution it still requires people be aware of who you are. Word of mouth can do it but traditional media has the power of hype. Word of mouth is a natural hype. Traditional media brokers in an artificial hype.

I think it's inevitable that the internet replaces traditional media but it means the death of the super star. We'll go back to more regional artists with few cross region cross overs if there is a lack of a artificial national hype machine like the labels.

I think that may be a good thing. You don't' need millions to produce good music and may mean that instead of a lottery mentality in artists you'd have more of a real natural industry. Instead of 90% going to the super stars and 10% divided over the desperate numbers of struggling artists you might have a profession where you could actually live off playing music without having to be a superstar or have a second job.

Never heard of it before now

[jj00]

I believe the real reason is that no one has really heard of the service and the site seems pretty amateurish.

Re:Never heard of it before now

[nwf]

Indeed, it looks just like a domain squatter site. When I first went there I though it was already gone and replaced by an advertisement site.

Tip for potential businesses: don't make a site whose business model relies on tech savvy people look like a site tech savvy people are trained to ignore.