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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.'"
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.
The Napster model is failing.
iTunes is a billion of cheap sales.
Napster is you pay us money or we cut off your music supply. It's subscription radio. Satellite radio is trying that and is barely surviving. One company had to buy the other in order to have enough customers to survive.
Subscription video/tv yea that works. subscription music will never work as people don't listen to music that way. At least Satellite subscription offered something unique.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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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