snapshot 4/17/08

Amazon Gains Share of Shrinking Paid Music Market
NPD’s annual survey of Internet users, which is some 80 percent of the population these days, found that 10 percent of the music they acquired last year came from paid downloads. That is a big increase from 7 percent in 2006. But since the number of physical CDs they bought plummeted, the overall share of music they paid for fell to 42 percent from 48 percent.

The NPD data for February show that so far Amazon has had a strong start, although it is still tiny. It now has one tenth the market share of Apple in the United States. Since Apple has largely dominated the per-track download sales, that makes Amazon the distant No.2 in the market, said Russ Crupnick, who runs NPD’s music service. That would give Amazon’s digital store an overall share of the American music market of about 2 percent.


Major label artists become paid bloggers?
LA-based social media site Buzznet, which provides audio, video, blogs and editorial content about the popular music scene, has just received an equity investment from major label Universal Music Group. Terms and conditions of the deal were not disclosed, but some are estimating the value of the transaction to be as high as $25 million, with both companies equally sharing revenue drawn from UMG's content on the site.

Universal is offering not only downloadable media to Buzznet, but also lending its artists as bloggers and editorialists. Artists will be guest posters on the site, providing exclusive original content that users can comment on and share with others.


MySpace Music Sees Major Money in Free Tunes
MySpace Music, the major-label-backed online service slated for a summer rollout, has grand plans of delivering "all the music in the world" for free. Once that mission is accomplished, according to MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, the cash will follow as music fans turn MySpace Music into a money-making machine with multiple revenue streams.

The new service will strip out band pages from the original MySpace site -- which just happens to be the world's most popular social-networking site -- and stream full-length songs and videos for free. MySpace Music will peddle DRM-free downloads, ringtones, concert tickets, T-shirts and more.


This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours
A German company has introduced a disposable DVD that can be viewed for 48 hours, then thrown away. The DVDs will sell for just €3.99 ($6.44 /£3.20). So, it's about the same price as a new video rental in Europe - and it used to be about the same price as in US, until the Mighty Dollar turned into the Pygmy Dollar. But there are no late fees and no need to pop the disk in the post or return to the store. This opens up DVD distribution possibilities for new premium-priced movie releases - to petrol stations, convenience stores, coffee shops and the like, as well as online retailers - as there is no longer the need to book the DVDs back in. That's the idea. Will it work?


MyPlayList Combines Flickr And Online Music
MyPlayList , a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France, combines streamed music and Flickr for a free music service that delivers visual as well as musical abundance. MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music to avoid any copyright issues.

To use, users enter the name of any band or singer, and the system automatically compiles a Flickr - music combination, or suggests an existing playlist if one is already in the system. Registered users can create custom playlists and the site offers various embedable versions as well.