snapshot 5/29/07

DRM-free iTunes set this week?
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/05/27/drm.free.itunes.this.week/
Apple is prepared to launch its DRM-free catalog of music from EMI this week, according to French sources familiar with negotiations for multiple online music stores. The seeming delay for introducing the new tier of content has been primarily attributed to a desire to offer the entire catalog at once in the unprotected format rather than a gradual rollout. The companies' technicians are simply in the later stages of encoding and hosting the files before they go live, the contact says.


Apple’s Lesson for Sony’s Stores: Just Connect
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/business/yourmoney/27digi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Customer response is told in the numbers. Last month, Apple released results for the quarter ended March 31. More than 21.5 million people visited its stores, which now number more than 180. Store sales were $855 million, up 34 percent from the quarter a year earlier, and they contributed more than $200 million in profits.

For perspective, look at the parallel story of Sony, which in 2004 began its attempt to create a branded retail chain. That was the same year Gateway closed the remnants of its 188-store chain. Today, Sony has 39 Sony Style stores, built out from the flagship stores in New York and San Francisco. The company’s breadth of product lines in consumer electronics and related accessories, as well as computers, would seem to give it a significant advantage over Apple. But because Sony does not release data on the stores’ sales or profits, it is hard to assess how its retail venture is doing.


Facebook users vote for iLike, but what happened to Audio?
http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/26/facebook-users-vote-for-ilike-but-what-happened-to-audio/
iLike’s users on Facebook have reached around 180,000 early this evening, from a mere 1,000 on Friday morning — that’s orders of magnitude larger than any other of the new Facebook applications

So why iLike? There’s been a huge demand for music-focused socializing on Facebook (which isn’t surprising considering how central music is to MySpace users). iLike helps people find new music by learning what their friends are listening to; through Facebook’s platform, it allows users to add music to profiles and help them find their favorite concerts (and learn which friends are going to which concerts). iLike also offers free mp3’s that match users’ tastes.


Leading the charge on iPhone
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003724582_brier28.html
think when people get their hands on it and really experience it — the touch screen is phenomenal, this touch screen is like nothing you've ever used — to experience that, the skepticism, I think, around some of those things will go away.

There are other things — you have the widgets, some of the Google applications that are coming — there are just so many things here that the price will not be an issue. It's a pretty incredible browsing environment. That's the first part that I think will blow people away. It's the first widescreen iPod they've ever done; it is very, very good, works extremely well.


Getting in the game at Microsoft; Robbie Bach's job is to make software giant's entertainment division profitable
http://www.contentagenda.com/articleXml/LN618621711.html?nid=3038
For all the challenges Microsoft Corp. faces as it moves into the future, the Redmond, Wash., software giant remains a formidable money machine. Its last quarter saw record profit, largely thanks to new versions of its Windows operating system and Office software. In its push to the digital future, however, where Microsoft envisions a world of "connected computing," where devices like phones, music players and game consoles increasingly define how people interact with computers, the company often finds itself playing catch-up.

That's where Robbie Bach comes in. Bach, 45, is president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, which includes the Xbox game console, the Zune music player, software that runs on mobile devices and new television projects. While the division has yet to turn a profit, Bach said in an interview that profitability is just around the corner, and Microsoft is relishing its competition with companies like Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Research In Motion.


Beatnik speeds mobile music downloads
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070529/tc_infoworld/88894;_ylt=AoMn4emBv1vEjpRQkor5hmVkM3wV
U.S. software company Beatnik is approaching mobile phone operators with a new music download system that compresses songs up to 10 times more than the MP3 format, allowing for faster downloads on lower-end mobile phones equipped with the company's software.

Beatnik's software compresses songs by taking common elements or repeated sounds and only replicating them once in the compressed file. The music player, on the client handset, can recreate those sounds in the right place during playback, Copp said.


Free, Legal, On Demand Steaming Music? LaLa is Going to Give it a Shot
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/29/free-legal-on-demand-steaming-music-lala-is-going-to-give-it-a-shot/
LaLa is making a very big bet on its business - it will offer users something they’ve never had (legally) before: free, legal, on demand streaming music. This is an extremely expensive business - unlike services like Pandora that have to pay only a fraction of a cent when they play a song (and it still hurts them), on demand streaming rates are more like $0.01 per song. That works out to an average of $0.17/user/hour, and there is no way to cover those costs with advertising alone.

So how will LaLa cover its costs? The company says they are going to sell CDs to users. Like a song? Click a button and get it sent to you. They say that if they can get each user to buy one CD per month on average they will break even. That may be true, but the average music buyer in the U.S. buys two CDs per year. So LaLa will have to get heavy music buyers to the site to move that average up.


The future of the music business...again
http://www.blogmaverick.com/2007/05/29/the-future-of-the-music-business-again/
Our ability to consume music has gotten incredibly easy over the past 25 years. From the walkman to the CD Walkman to the IPod, we have ditched the album (to the chagrin of milk crate manufacturers everywhere) and evolved to the point where an 80gb IPod has the capacity to carry every song we might imagine listening to over the course of our lifetime. So easy that it revived Apple and catapulted the company from an innovative niche PC marketer to a technology leader. So easy that we consume more music than ever before, yet total sales are in a tailspin.Can the music industry be saved ? Yep. It would be so easy its scary. Make music available anywhere and everywhere.