Slashdot Mirror
Is Shawn Fanning's Snocap melting?
newtley writes "Rumors are swirling about the pending demise of Napster creator Shawn Fanning's Snocap, says former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson. 'Articles mention a sale, but more likely it will be a shuttering and quiet bankruptcy,' he believes. 'Snocap represents a commonplace occurrence in the music business — an unprofitable retailer which withers and eventually dies.'"
Unprofitable business goes out of business, news at 11.
Further evidence of global warming, obviously....
Without Napster arriving on the scene more than 10 years ago and opening our eyes to the power of p2p, I wonder what sort of world we'd be living in today. Would the record companies have been smarter in their online moves? Would we have a system of DRM that wasn't obnoxious? Would we even have a clear idea of what sorts of rights we'd want with regards to ephemeral data like music and movies? Shawn Fanning brought all these concepts to a head and we've been changed because of it.
The only SnoCap that is any good is Pyramid's version, but I don't think we can easily share that online. It's really something better to be shared peer to peer.
I hate to be Mr. Offended-too-easily. But I was slightly shocked to see the article describe the business model as "pair of sandals to every China man" - a racist epithet that would get you punched in the mouth in the wrong company! The article puts the term in quotes, but a Google search of the term just points back to the article in question. What gives? It's hard to believe a gentleman-CEO on a semi-respectable website would throw racist terminology around.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I blame the GWs: George W. Bush and Global Warming.
"Shuttering"? What the hell?
Get your knickers out of a twist you pansie. It just means that you can still make a lot of money from something small, if you just sell enough of it.
1 billion sales with a tiny profit still amounts to a hell of a lot of money, China is well known for having the world largest population. Why do you think the US is bending over backwards for this communist country while Cuba (population 2 people and a dog) is on every banlist they can think up?
As for sandals, that is about as racist as saying the dutch wear wooden shoes or the americans cowboy hats.
It is simple, if you mamange to make a single dollar cent of every chinese person in the world, you are still filthy rich.
I doubt the chinese are offended by it, it is not like the US related saying "nobody has every grown poor by underestimating the intelligence of the american customer".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Last week Snocap got pegged as among the year's top 11 losers: 6. Snocap Laid of 60% of workforce after losing CD Baby as a customer. CD Baby founder Derek Sivers offered illuminating insight to the eight-month partnership when he pointed to a paltry earning of $1,080 during the period. Snocap is now trying to re-define the direction of the company. http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/7002/2007-losers.html
Until I googled it I didn't even know it was controversial .... it's archaic, but it isn't inherently racist unless you make an effort to know what language the PC corps of America has deemed unacceptable regardless of intent and use it despite that knowledge. I personally didn't know, I expect he didn't either.
This is the guy that took linux and tried to force his closed source click n run crap into Ubuntu. Basically, if you are someone who can help Mr Roberts, he's your best mate.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
So, I was wondering exactly how he managed to make that business idea unprofitable. Until I ran across this part of the article; "Nonetheless they gave MySpace a mountain of money to give it a run."
Oh. I see.
Ok, here's a hint for future venturers in the music sales business (or, in fact, any business): dont hand mountains of money to any joker you run across. As soon as you hand over those mountains you're the one who's taking the loss.
If this is true (I haven't read up on all the figures), then this is what is wrong with the recording industry. If you can't make a profit selling millions of copies of something for £10 which costs (basically) nothing to replicate, and is the work of a few people over less than a year, your business is screwed. Seriously.
No, selling music is _not_ like selling gravel. When was the last time itunes ran out of stock of a downloadable song? The entire idea is stupid. If itunes sell me a song which I download, do they no longer have the song?
As I said in the comments on the p2p site:
Recorded music will always have a market value of zero, or close to it. Even $1 per song is too high, and this price will fall.
All markets rely on supply and demand: as the supply of an item, prices fall. As the demand for an item goes down, prices fall.
Digital music has a near-infinite supply. Transfering 3MB of data (say, one song), as a cost of less than 1/2 cents from a server. P2P the cost is trivial and far lower.
Yet there IS a way to make money with music: it's called performing and value added items. When you go to work, say flipping burgers, you're paid for the act of working, the labor. The person who invented the burger doesn't charge fees for the act of making a burger. Music is no different. Making music, the act of writing it, is akin to learning how to make a burger. All of us get trained at no profit, and sometimes at great risk of a loss of time. Learning to make music is tricky, and it is artistic, but it should be no different in terms of learning how to make a burger, or learning how to fix a leaky faucet.
Bands will soon rely only on the performance of their music. That's what differentiates one band from another: their ability to entertain. And entertainment has GREAT value. There are many ways for bands to make money entertaining. You can play live. Maybe sell your CDs and include 1 ticket to a live concert. Or sell a CD, and include 5 tickets to an online performance.
Making money doesn't end there. How about selling CDs and offering CD purchasers the chance to win an hour of lessons in how to play their favorite song? Oh wait, the government prevents bands from offering contests in exchange for buying an item. It's the law that harms the musician.
You can make money selling autographed albums, or selling DVDs or CDs of the actual concert people attended. The cost to record a concert, and burn 50 CDs in 10 minutes before people leave, is trivial.
Don't complain about the zero value of recorded music -- its a market process that can't be worked around. Instead, find ways to MAKE MONEY WITH YOUR NEW AND ONGOING LABORS. Just like the burger flipper or the faucet-leak fixer.
---
I own a small music production and marketing business, and I help quite a few local bands make money. How do we do it? We book them shows non-stop. We target cities in the middle of nowhere, visit there once, build a street team, and then go back over and over and over. We sell awesome and rare silkscreened posters that cost us $0.15 each but sell for $5, $10 with an autograph. We sell limited edition LPs (yes, records) and move to sell them out faster than we get them in.
I designed a system that records a concert (music feed from the board, two cameras without cameramen) and burns DVDs of the show within 15 minutes of the end of the show. Those DVDs can be given away, or sold for a small price. Sell 5 DVDs for $5 and let people in the town give them to friends (or better yet, give them away freely). This generates more buzz for future shows.
A band is no different than a plumber, a burger-flipper, or an architect. We all learn how to produce new labor on our own time and dime, and then we use that learning to generate income by working. Recorded music is marketing, and marketing has a cost, rarely a profit. You market yourself to get people to pay for your future labor, not your past.
I see a future in my small market to generate millions, but not online, and not with the recorded music. Instead, we're talking about packing shows in Bertrand, Nebraska and DeKalb, Illinois, where there are thousands of teenagers and young adults who are seriously bored out of their minds sitting on the web all day long. They want, and pay for, good bands to come out and charge their lives with loud and fun music. Don't visit a town once, visit it 6 times a year. A tour van costs $15,000, and the gas is $100 or so a show. Pack a venue with 300 young adults paying $6 each, sell $1000 in completely
imeem has a deal with snocap and is using their audio fingerprinting technology to figure out who owns the copyright on all the music that users upload and who gets paid. Perhaps snocap just has to wait a few more months until imeem's growth brings in some real revenues for snocap, but even this deal makes them more attractive to potential buyers. Conspiracy theorists might raise the possibility that myspace might make a point of purchasing snocap because (a) snocap has a deal with them and (b) they could directly attack imeem.com which is diving headlong into their business by offering the artists a better deal than myspace ever has. While imeem has been paing artists who have their music shared on the site, myspace has resited allowing artists to make anything off music plays on their myspace pages. Myspace has been banning the string 'imeem.com' from their pages for most of this year, so it doesn't sound so ridiculous that they might borrow some more cash from newscorp just to inconvenience a rappidly growing competitor.
Up for it.
Snocap had everything going for them, and could have probably succeeded, but their execution was so bad that it was unbearable.
Check out my What happened with CD Baby and Snocap article, and especially the comments below it, with all these musicians so frustrated that Snocap won't reply to anybody's emails.
The most brilliant idea, with bad execution, is worth nothing.
Racism sucks but violence is 100 times worse. You're a piece of shit.
him, lars ulrich and dr. dre spent the last 10 years snorting all that sn0w. real soon lars is gonna make dre real paranoid how they are losing PROFITS!!! and start cap'n everyone's ass, leading way to a new rap about the evils of sn0wcaps. that's right ALL you thieve'n college kids, recognize da copyrights...or this might happen to you.
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
This has been all over Valleywag for quite some time. Shawn Fanning long ago moved on to a new company, CEO Rusty Rueff slowly destroyed the original vision.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here but he's just some geek who wrote a poorly implemented, centralized, file sharing database engine that people used to keep track of who had what music so they could share it, right?
So, what makes that so 'special' that he's a 'guru' in the online music biz? He isn't. He's a guy who wrote a server application to track music on various peoples pc's and facilitated basic transfers between them. Sounds like a weekend project to me.
Even Marc Andresen is a little smarter than that, but not much. And he doesn't deserve the hype or 'respect' he seems to get. The only reason any of these guys get the press they do is because they were 'discovered' by VC firms and others and perceived to be 'smart'. I dare say that the average Slashdotter could have done anything they did better, faster, and with more finesse.
The REAL people behind these things like Snocap are the Wall street or Venture Capitalist guys who talk to some bozo's who come up with the spreadsheets and business plans to build this earth shaking new product. You think Shawn is the driving force behind that? No way. He's just the guy who says "Oh yeah! Great Idea! I can build that with a team of programmers in 6 months for $5 million and 25% stake in the company!".
These are maybe 'above average' programmers. But businessmen? I think not.
But hey, they're millionaires and I'm not. So what do I know?
I tried to think, but nothin' happened!
And here I thought the Negros, honkys, slant eyes and the redmen were the only ones. Whod a thunk it?