Wednesday, January 30, 2008

snapshot 1/30/08

Sony BMG MP3’s Up On Amazon
A quick search on Amazon today found thousands of DRM free mp3’s from Sony BMG artists ranging from Bob Dylan to The Foo Fighters to George Winston. Some acts only had full album downloads available with a “Comin Soon” on individual mp3 tracks.

In the next few days as the rest of the Sony BMG catalog is added as DRM free (which means you can move around and copy them without restrictions), Amazon will be the only download service to offer the music of all four major label groups (SonyBMG, Universal, Warner Music Group, and EMI) in unrestricted mp3’s.


Yahoo Chopping 1,000; Premium Music Threatened
Yahoo officially announced plans to trim 1,000 workers on Tuesday, a number that falls below earlier estimates. Yahoo cofounder and chief executive Jerry Yang announced the reductions during the latest earnings call, one that revealed a substantial fourth quarter profit drop. During the call, the company did not detail specific cuts, though president Susan Decker alluded to reductions in "premium music," a category that includes the subscription-based Yahoo Music Unlimited.


Is The Tippin Point Toast? Music Marketing Needs To Change...Again
For the last several years, the concepts laid out in the best selling book "The Tipping Point" have driven marketing campaigns in general and music marketing in particular. But new studies raise serious questions about the validity of the book's core theories.

The Tipping Point particularly touted the importance of Influentials - well-connected individuals who amplify trends by sharing their opinions with their social networks. Just get these trend-setters on board and the rest will follow. It's a seductive concept particularly in the viral interconnected world of social MySapce, Facebook, Twitter, imeem and the entire social networking universe.

This is sobering stuff for music promotion and marketing. The industry has known for years that no amount of money can create a real hit or a career that lasts. Perhaps the future of the music industry is less about telling consumers what's hot and more about listening to what fans are telling us they want to hear.


Q&A: We7 CEO Steve Purdham
Following this week’s Qtrax fiasco, ad-supported music download services are very much in the spotlight. UK-based We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, is once such offering, enabling users to download free MP3s that have a short (and targeted) audio advert embedded at the start of each track. The ads then auto-expire after four weeks of listening, allowing users to re-download a ‘clean’ version of each track.


Amazon Earnings Call Details: Web Services Use Up More Bandwidth Than Amazon.com; The Kindle is a Hit
At the very end of the call, Bezos was asked about the shift in media from physical to digital and how that will impact Amazon. Media accounted for 59 percent of Google’s sales last quarter (or $3.3 billion), and Amazon is moving aggressively to offer digital movies, music, and books. Bezos thinks this move to digital will eventually pay off:

When media was largely physical, it made sense to buy it in the physical
world. But as media becomes digital it does not make so much sense to buy them
in the physical world. The bulk of the sales now are in the physical world. So
our relative advantage over time should improve.

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