We all know that the music industry has dramatically struggled with music piracy on peer-to-peer networks over the last few years and blame their revenue decline on all that illegal activity. We now see that 25 million Americans download priated movies as well. Here is the thing about piracy people just don’t seem to realize.…
I’ve been thinking about our brand a lot lately. And thinking about its place within the overall digital music market and thinking about differentiation via brand (as opposed to functionality). One of the things about the big consumer digital music market: it’s big and there is lots of competition. For the most part, they all…
I am not actually someone who rails against DRM (although recently it seems so). But I am clearly no fan of DRM restrictions – and more important – the interoperability issues inherent in DRM. So, I am happy to hear that, maybe DRM free, legal music is on the way. According to the NY Times, overheard at…
Ruckus has launched (again) as a college download service. It’s intended as a way to get students to stop downloading illegally by offering them a free download service. Free – meaning advertisement based. In their new model, they are doing a rev share with the labels and offering “free content” to students. “Free” in the…
XM Radio is in legal trouble with the RIAA; the courts have refused to dismiss the case regarding their player/recorder, “Inno”. The allegation is that XM is acting as a means to infringe on copyrights by offering a service+device that allows the recording of digital streams. These recorded streams (as files) can then be played back at will and in any order. …
Last year the legal, on-line digital music market grew 189% (still pales in comparison to p2p swapping stats of course). This year, it “doubled”. That is remarkable; kind of. Why not tripled? Why are CD sales continuing to fall? In my view, it’s a question of value to the consumer. With the increase in digital players…
I read Fred Wilson’s blog pretty regularly (it’s a great blog) and he has some very interesting insights. He just posted about the future of digital music and it sparked a bit of hot debate on his blog. In a nutshell, he’s saying that the future of digital music is not in pay-per-download (ie: iTunes),…
Napster has a new partner agreement in place with AOL to help build revenue. The two companies signed a deal where Napster will take over AOL Music’s (previously a MusicNet company) subscriber base. Add to the mix that Napster put it self on the auction block recently and this has very interesting implications for the new…
EMI has shaken up its senior management and ousted a couple long standing significant players. With music revenue down an additional 10%, shares down 26% and digital music only accounting for 8.5% of total sales, the picture is bleak for EMI right now. Hence the change in management. However, it was just a change, not actually…
We’ve been working with Spencer over at CDBaby for well over a year now on our contract to license their content. And…. it’s done – signed, complete! We’re now licensed to sell CDBaby content. Well – 75% of it anyway, since we’re a peer-to-peer service. Everyone over at CDBaby has been really fantastic – we’re…
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