snapshot 7/17/08

Volume rises for music video games
Music genre games "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" are bona-fide smash hits, entering the rarefied air once reserved for only the elite first-person shooters, "Mario" games or sports titles. And success breeds imitation. Music games seemed to be everywhere at this week's E3 video game trade show and it wasn't just Activision Blizzard Inc showing off its upcoming "Guitar Hero: World Tour" or MTV Games, a unit of Viacom Inc, providing a sneak peek at "Rock Band 2." Both are due out later this year.


Amazon.com to launch new online TV, movie store: report
Web retailer Amazon.com Inc will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand, The New York Times said. Customers of Amazon's new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service, the paper said.

The service is different from most Internet video stores, such as Apple's iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon's video store, which require users to wait as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.


It's official: Audiophiles are over CDs
That week's question: how do you listen to digital music? The poll says 34 percent still use CD players as their primary digital source. Thirty-six percent use a computer-based server, and 10 percent use dedicated servers such as Sonos or Squeezebox. Another 4 percent use iPods! I felt a little better that 11 percent use a SACD or DVD-Audio player. Another 3 percent voted "other."


Download free 'Into the Wild' MP3 audiobook from Borders
To help kick off its new MP3-audiobook download service, Borders is offering Jon Krakauer's spellbinding "Into the Wild" free of charge through July 19. You do need to sign up for a Borders Digital Audiobooks account, but it's free to do so, and that's the only catch.

Well, actually, there's one more: To access the book (and any others you purchase), you have to install something called OverDrive Media Console (currently Windows-only--grrr). It's basically a download manager that organizes your audiobooks and generates multi-part MP3s (which you can then copy to any portable player using the software of your choice--iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.--or burn to CDs).


@ MusicTank: Lavigne To Rake $2 Million From YouTube Plays
Avril Lavigne is set to score a big pay day thanks to YouTube revenue. Her Nettwerk Management CEO Terry McBride told MusicTank’s Face To Face With The Millennials in London today: ”There’s about a $2 million cheque waiting for her for all her YouTube plays.” Next up, they’re targeting the Far-East: “We will start a Mandarin website (for Lavigne) with Mandarin ads and we will make a shitload of money, because 40 percent of her intellectual property value comes from Asia.”

McBride, whose label gained notoriety through innovative online distribution strategies and for donating legal fees to those fighting RIAA filesharing lawsuits, said Nettwerk expects its revenue from digital to tip beyond 70 percent this year. That’s massively more than the 25.5 percent eMarketer forecasts the global music business will make from digital this year.

McBride also said labels should be retailing digital tracks at a sweet spot of just $0.25, albums for $2: “You’d see a huge shift; we haven’t even given kids the choice to show us this tipping point yet ... the profit margin in the digital space is about 300 percent that inside the physical space.”


AimeStreet Debuts Charity Downloads
Watch out Bono. Variable priced download leader AmieStreet has named Creative Visions Foundation as the lead charity in "Download To Make A Difference" a new campaign using downloads to support humanitarian causes. It kicks off with AmieStreet donating $2 to Creative Visions for every free download of the new single, "Anything," by composer-philanthropist Peter Buffett and multi-platinum star Akon exclusively available at AmieStreet.com/CreativeVisions.


Apricado: Selling Your Music Has Never Been This Easy
Over the last few years we’ve seen a number of online music stores that offer independent artists a way to sell their music without a recording contract. And while a handful of these sites, like AmieStreet , have done especially well, but they tend to be pretty involved - you can’t just upload your songs and start getting paid. Apricado , a new startup that launches today in private beta, is looking to solve this problem by streamlining the process as much as possible.

Apricado makes the music submission process ridiculous easy (perhaps to a fault): After uploading a song, the site will automatically detect the artist name and generate a music store (for example, a song by Mika would generate www.apricado.com/Mika). Each song sold will be distributed without DRM, and the site will only take a 20% cut of the revenues (industry standards are usually 30% or more). Visitors who navigate to this site will be presented with a list of available songs. After entering their credit card information on the same page, the selected songs as downloaded as a single .zip file. Artists can also get embed codes for their stores, so they can offer a mini-marketplace on their blogs or MySpace (a Facebook app is on the way).