Thursday, February 14, 2008

snapshot 2/14/08

Borders opens bookshelves to digital services
But follow the table of books snaking off to the right, and you'll come face-to-face with Borders' newest retail strategy: a digital center where you can download music or books, burn CDs, research family histories, print pictures and order leather-bound books crammed with family photos - with help from clerks who know how to do those sorts of things and won't embarrass you if you don't.

Borders, the nation's second-largest bookstore chain, hopes to reverse years of sluggish sales by reinventing itself as a hub for knowledge, entertainment and digital downloading. Exhibit A is the new store that will open to the public here Thursday - the first of 14 that Borders plans to unveil this year. Borders' plans underscore the anxiety in the bookstore industry, which has been hurt by the growing footprint of online-only sellers.


Overlay.tv allows on-video ads from iTunes, more
Hoping to create a new way for even amateur video providers to make money, Overlay.TV says it has developed a new platform that can integrate ads into the content itself in an unintrusive way. The self-title service takes Flash-based videos from many common video sites (including MySpace and YouTube) and lets users create clickable areas in a video that tie into related ads; ads can be as subtle as links hovering over products that are already part of the video or as conspicuous as normal ads, Overlay.TV says. The resulting videos can then be embedded anywhere that accepts normal HTML code such as blogs or social networking sites.

Importantly, the service does not require the major content deals that are often needed with other sites. Overlay.TV has already established its own affiliate networks that includes roughly 600 significant advertisers who will provide click-through revenues; this involves direct links to Apple's iTunes Store for songs and videos as well as more conventional purchases from Amazon and Wal-Mart. The feature is also said to be less intrusive as viewers are not forced to view the ads. Overlay.TV is live today and is free to use.


Publishers File Suit Against MediaNet
everal members of the National Music Publishers’ Association have filed a class action lawsuit against MediaNet seeking damages, a declaratory judgment and injunctive relief "to put an end to MediaNet's willful and ongoing copyright infringement". MediaNet delivers the downloads and tech that powers online stores for Yahoo!, HMV and others. Publisher plaintiffs include Sony/ATV, Peer International, Frank Music and MPL.

The suit argues that MediaNet was originally covered under a 2001 agreement when it was owned by record labels, the company has refused to enter into a new agreement since 2005 when it was bought by private equity firm Baker Capital in 2005.


AirSpun, Inc. Launches Social Music Discovery and Music Video Features to Help Fans Connect with Top Indie Bands
Fan web-pages and widgets, "sounds like" search, social networking, and music video features complete new suite of music discovery tools at airspun.com. The latest developments connect serious music lovers directly with new bands that match their musical tastes. Fans in the AirSpun community can now influence which bands top the charts and receive free radio promotions.

AirSpun's new social music tools help fans connect with others who like the same music, discover new bands using the new "sounds like" search, and create an audio player widget to embed in their social networking sites (such as MySpace and Facebook). Music fans can influence which songs and bands reach the top of the charts and help them earn free radio airtime by including their music in a free fan widget. AirSpun's rapidly growing community of indie bands, artists, and labels is nearly 16,000 strong and consists of original recording artists actively selling and marketing their music.


Once Again, Digital Album Sales Get Top Billing
Music fans prefer one-off downloads, but digital album sales are now making a more serious impact. Just recently, heavy digital album sales boosted the Juno soundtrack to the top of the charts, and gave Rhino Entertainment its first number one.
This past week, Jack Johnson enjoyed substantial album sales, and a similar, top-place finish. Specifically, Johnson shifted 375,000 copies of Sleep Through the Static (Brushfire), of which 37 percent were digital. The digital album sales total of 137,000 is a new record, according to Nielsen Soundscan. The result also helped to raise US-based weekly sales totals by 11 percent, though cumulative totals remain 14 percent below comparable, 2007 sales.


Steve Jobs rules the recording industry. Now what?
One of those places is Apple's iTunes online music store. For several days last week, the top-selling track on the store was Yael Naim's "New Soul," a song available, at least to U.S. audiences, exclusively via iTunes. The exclusivity isn't a big deal -- the store is powerful enough to offer plenty of high-profile exclusives -- but the reason "New Soul" became a hit is a big deal. "New Soul" was a hit solely because it appeared in Apple's commercial for the MacBook Air. Until the 1980s, record companies looked to radio to break new artists. Until five years ago, the place to launch new performers was music video. For most of this decade, the breakdown of traditional music channels has led to new songs being noticed via video games, television shows, and -- most of all -- commercials. Whoever is programming the music for Apple's television commercials may be, right now, the most powerful talent scout in the record industry.

How did Apple gain all this power? The record companies, desperate, vain, and stupid, handed it over. As Michael Hirschorn wrote in the March Atlantic (I'd link to his terrific essay, but the venerable Atlantic tends to get around to uploading new articles to its website weeks after they appear in print), "Steve Jobs shanghaied and basically destroyed the CD business. The major record labels, in giving Apple's iTunes the right to sell individual songs for 99 cents each, undermind their own business model -- selling bundles of songs gathered together into something called an album for up to $20 a pop -- because they didn't see that people were about to consumer music in an entirely new way. The labels saw iTunes as free money; 'ancillary,' in the legal vernacular. Jobs took their cheap music and used it as a loss leader to sell his expensive iPods, and the traditional music business now lies in tatters." The punch line, of course, is that the record industry is trying to shut out Apple by selling music online elsewhere such as Amazon -- for a mere 89 cents per cut.


YouTube to become affiliate seller for iTunes and AmazonMP3?
Buried inside YouTube’s large CSS file are two very interesting images found by the blog Googlified - one is a button for the iTunes Store, the other for Amazon’s MP3 store. These seem to indicate that YouTube is gearing up to become what amounts to an affiliate seller for these two stores.

If that is the case, it’s a very smart move on Google’s part. YouTube is the medium by which many people watch music videos and musical performances - as of right now if someone likes a song they would have to remember the name of it, open their music store of choice and search for it. These buttons will provide one-click access to purchases, which you can be sure will drive more sales.

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