Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
There is a great article in the FT this morning which makes some interesting points about the current state of the music industry.
We sometimes hear dire warnings from music labels that if piracy is not decimated, music will die. But there is no evidence of that so far - lots of enjoyable new bands turn [...]
Rhapsody yesterday announced the launch of a new music service which has some cool features:
Music will be available DRM free from all major labels - they join Amazon, Walmart, Napster and iTunes in selling DRM free MP3s, pretty much signalling the end for DRM in my view
A partnership with Verizon brings mobile phones into the [...]
Wow!
That is a lot.
From an old article on VentureBeat:
Anywhere.fm
Deezer
Ezmo
Finetune
Flytunes
Freemusiczilla
Fuzz
The Hype Machine
iLike
Imeem
Jango
Lala
LastFM
Maestro
Media Master
Meemix
Melodeo
Mog
MP3tunes
Musana
MySpace
Mystrands
Orb
Pandora
Phling
Qbox.com
RadioBlogClub
Reverbnation
Seeqpod
SkreemR
Slacker
Songbeat
Songza
SpiralFrog
Streampad
Virb
We7
YouTube
Update - at least one of them has given up the ghost already. And they said goodbye in style. This was from Ezmo:
On March 14th 11:00 CET Ezmo was declared dead by Dr Alban.
-
The Ezmo team has decided to put their acquired [...]
The future continues to look bleak for record labels as they are becoming less and less important to their artists. This is from Dave Cushman’s blog (tks to OpenGardens for the pointer):
Robbie Williams had made five times as much money from his deal with T-mobile Sony Ericsson in one year than he had from [...]
Last week Jeff Nolan wrote a post entitled Incrementalism and “The New New Thing” where he bemoans the lack of true innovation and the state of venture capital generally. He is talking about Silicon Valley, but what he writes applies equally over here in Europe.
He correctly observes that a lot of money is still [...]
Back in February I blogged that unrealistic pricing assumptions from the music majors are holding back the development of free ad-supported music services. At the time I didn’t have any hard data, but was drawing on comments from ad-supported music startups at the Midem conference.
Now, courtesy of Reuters, we have some numbers:
Ad-supported download service [...]
In the internet world content needs to be free. This is a theme I have addressed tangentially from a couple of different angles (e.g. Content atomisation and in-feed monetisation or Free ad-supported music coming closer to reality) but this Guardian piece from Vic Keegan takes it head on from a historical perspective (thanks to [...]
Apple is now the number one music retailer in the US. From ars technica:
Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US. Now, Apple has ascended [...]
Over on Snipperoo Ivan is pushing the idea that the destination site is on it’s way out. The idea follows on nicely, of course, from his obsession with widgets, but as usual I think he might be on to something.
Ivan’s main point is that many, many people use search engines to get to sites, [...]
Stimulated by news of a new service from Myspace, a couple of weeks back we were talking on this blog about how free ad-supported music was on it’s way but that unrealistic pricing assumptions from the labels were holding the market back.
Maybe not for much longer.
Reported on Mashable this morning:
Reports were filed last month by [...]
