snapshot 5/21/08

AOL Music Launches Genre-Specific Destinations
AOL Music, among the most heavily-trafficked music destinations, has now launched a pair of genre-specific sites. The first is The Boot (theboot.com), a country-specific site, and The Boom Box (theboombox.com), a destination dedicated to hip-hop and r&b. That is part of a broader, genre-geared strategy, one that already includes PopEater (popeater.com). It also includes Spinner (spinner.com), which has been recast into an indie-focused website.

The destinations collectively jump into the music-focused blog arena, an area that frequently features genre- or scene-specific coverage. The AOL Music sites are being filled with video and song premieres, news, photos, and interviews. The destinations are being monetized by advertising, according to the company.


Microsoft pitches Zune-based ad service
Microsoft on Thursday revealed its plans for an advertising network built into its Zune media players, offering advertisers a direct line to consumers through the device. Yahoo writes that the company demonstrated the concept using a phony Doritos mockup. In the example, a user could befriend a musician through the Zune social page on a Doritos’ sponsored concert to view news and updates on the artist’s profile.

Once added to the friends list, users could also email the profile to friends, as well as downloading selected tracks from the website for playback on the Zune. When the recipient receives the email through Microsoft’s Hotmail service through their mobile phone, a brief ad will trigger, followed by a short game similar to Asteroids. Provided the user does well at the game, they earn a coupon for a free bag of Doritos chips, with map directions to nearby stores that sell the chips.


HP to run DVD, download service for PTA
Hewlett-Packard, which folded the movie download store it ran for Wal-Mart in December, is getting back into the business, this time partnering with The Parent Teachers Assn. and the Boys and Girls Club of America to launch kid-friendly online video stores. The stores will launch today with 10,000 DVD titles and nearly 1,000 movie downloads from every major studio for sale. HP plans to add movies from its manufactured-on-demand service to the selection in the coming months.


Last.fm Quietly Rolls Out New Beta Features, Points to Expanded Subscription
The site's little-publicized music subscription service costs $3 per month. In its current iteration, the basic subscription removes ads, shows who's been cruising your profile, lets others listen to your station and allows faster access during peak usage hours. Last.fm says it will continue offering this basic subscription, but that an upcoming subscription package will include unlimited access to the catalogs of all four major labels plus 150,000 indie labels and artists. As of now, Last.fm users can listen to any artist/label-uploaded track up to three times for free (songs that have been heard three times will still play on the site's radio stations).

But this Last.fm beta, currently available only to current basic subscribers, is about much more than just the upcoming subscription package; it involves a full redesign, adding powerful features for playing, sharing and adding music to your library from anywhere on the site. To those ends, the site has added a new player at the top of every page that lets you play whatever music is listed there, so there will be "hopefully no more digging around for play buttons and radio stations," Donovan said. Every music page has also been set up to encourage sharing with friends or adding songs to your library. You can also browse your friends' libraries and add tracks from there. In addition, the beta lets users manually add songs and artists to their libraries in addition to having them added automatically, or "scrobbled," via iTunes or their preferred media player. This will let you expand your music collection purely through Last.fm, rather than acquiring the music elsewhere and scrobbling it into your library.



Pew/Internet Study Offers Insights Into Consumer Behavior
A new study by the Pew/Internet & American Life Project titled "The Internet and Consumer Choice: Online Americans Use Different Search and Purchase Strategies for Different Goods" (main page, 42-page PDF of study) examines how Americans use the Internet to buy music and search for information. It offers great insight into the importance of pre-Internet mass media like TV and radio as well as traditional word of mouth, and it shows how different age groups have different preferences for formats and pre- and post-purchase behaviors.

Search For Information
· Only 7% of respondents said online information had a major impact on music purchases.
· Of the respondents that made the music purchase online, only 22% said online information had a major impact on the purchase decision.
· 86% of music buyers find out about music through TV, radio or movies.
· 64% of music buyers find out about music through family, friends or co-workers.
· 56% of music buyers find out about music through online tools such as artist websites or streaming samples.
· Only 42% of music buyers said online information helped them save money on the purchase.
· 51% of respondents said online information had no impact whatsoever on their music purchases, 37% said it had a minor impact and 12% said it had a major impact.

Formats:
· 82% of respondents (69% for people under 35) said they still buy all (62%) or most (20%) of their music in the CD format.
· 15% (27% for people under 35) said half the music they purchased were individual digital files.


Amazon's Blue Light MP3 Special
That $1.99 Van Morrison album I bought on Friday is back to its regular price, but it looks like Amazon.com MP3 -- in addition to its weekly $5 deals -- now has a regular daily special: Yesterday it was a Green Day collection for $2.99, today it's a live album from BB King for $3.99.