Tuesday, March 4, 2008

snapshot 3/4/08

Nokia opens online music store in Germany
Nokia opened on Monday its online music store in Germany, the second such store for the world's largest cell phone maker, which plans to open the stores in nine more countries by mid-2008. Nokia's German music store will charge 1 euro ($1.52) per track, compared with the largest online music retailer Apple's iTunes' 0.99 euros charge.


Audio book publishers drop copy protections
Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anti-copying software on digital downloads of audio books. Random House, a division of Bertelsmann, was the first to announce it was backing away from DRM, or digital rights management, software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world's largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States, appears set to follow suit. Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, said the company would make all of its audio book titles available for download in the MP3 format on eMusic, the Web's second-largest digital music service after iTunes.


Wal-Mart stirs CD pricing pot with multi-tiered plan
The major music companies have been resistant to lowering their price on CDs, but now they may be dragged to that point: Wal-Mart, the largest retailer of music with an estimated 22 percent market share, has proposed a five-tiered pricing scheme that would allow the discounter to sell albums at even lower prices and require the labels to bear more of the costs.

According to sources, the Wal-Mart proposal would allow for a promotional program that could comprise the top 15 to 20 hottest titles, each at $10. The rest of the pricing structure, according to several music executives who spoke with Billboard, would have hits and current titles retailing for $12, top catalog at $9, midline catalog at $7 and budget product at $5. The move would also shift the store's pricing from its $9.88 and $13.88 model to rounder sales prices.


Merge Records Store via Coolfer
Merge Records has launched a download stores that sells MP3s for individual tracks and complete albums and FLAC for complete albums only. I'll continue to get Merge music at eMusic, a much cheaper option. (Merge Records Store)



Songza gets a memory, adds some new bling
Now Songza offers users even more options. According the the Songza team, the ability to save playlists has been the most requested feature. That feature has been added. Once you register for a free Songza account, you can save your playlist. The user profile page is simple and intuitive, and we have a feeling it's the sign of more networking/sharing features to come.The Songza interface has been updated too. The same overall style that we know and love remains, but there is now more emphasis on a users playlist (which is always present on the right-hand side of the page). Additionally, a "Most Played" tab has been added to the search area. The Songza interface is what really sets the site away from other music search engines. It is easy to use, clean to look at and fast loading. Now, it's even better.


AppleTV vs Vudu vs xBox360 Video Download Battlemodo
Now that you've seen all the evidence I could gather. It's a toss up to me, though I think for content I have to lean towards Vudu and for pure video quality (and most HD content) the Xbox 360 is hard to beat. Meanwhile, Apple TV is cheapest and lives up to its name with the best access to actual TV programming—though NBC is still painfully absent


eMusic making good money from back catalog
During a recent lunch meeting in New York, eMusic CEO David Pakman made a remarkable claim. Each quarter, the company sells at least one copy of 67 percent of its total inventory, and has done so consistently. That's 2.1 million unique tracks moved every three months, indicating that demand for music is far richer and deeper than sometimes assumed by labels and radio stations.

With two-thirds of its total inventory still selling at least small amounts, Pakman sees a similar opportunity with long tail video content. He tells me that eMusic has hopes to offer a similar deep catalog of video content currently of little use to owners, mainly television content from the last century that has no current commercial outlet. eMusic has nothing to announce on this front yet, and Pakman says the company will act only if it can offer DRM-free downloads, as it does for music and audiobooks.

No comments: