CNet. Internet music distribution entrepreneurs should give it up. They should focus on becomming an independent label with a lean cost structure. I agree. This should have been the model for MP3.com (or at least it was when they started out).
>>>As anyone who has spent any time with a major will tell you, these are immensely profitable businesses that have absolutely no inclination to change anything they are doing--ever. Record companies make obscene amounts of money manufacturing little silver disks, sending them out through distributors that they own, and getting retailers to push them over the counter at $16 a pop (and paying those retailers a pittance in the process). A truly great business.<<<
Frankly, this is exactly the kind of business that will continue to face consumer backlash in the new economy. They are inefficient and have erected artificial barriers to competition in order to charge excessive prices. Until albums arrive on my hard-drive at $2-3 a pop, they won't get any of my business. Nothing in between works. This may take ten years, but in the meantime I will continue to use Kazaa. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Hmmm, given how much they have been crying loss, maybe it's time that record companies get a serious audit of their books to see just how bad they are really doing.
Distribution technology and services are just ways of helping someone else sell their valuable assets, and are certainly not a basis for entrepreneurship. It's the control over the assets themselves, and not the pipes to deliver them, that will drive shareholder value in new music companies. The online distribution of music is not about technology. More than enough technology exists to produce any consumer music service you could possibly imagine. The game will really get interesting when the very heart of the music industry--the creation and sourcing of music--is challenged [Robert von Goeben on Cnet]
Given the ever lower cost of entry to building a home studio/editing suite, the money may well be in delivering the integrated systems for editing, and providing hosting to get the bands off the ground. Scratch that (hosting). Internet radio that plays indie bands, with feeds flagged by genre, date, popularity, and region, users can then hear the new thing wordwide if they wish, as well as download it if they so desire. It's been done, I know, and internet radio is under assault all over the place, but a heavenly jukebox is still a laudable goal.
9:36:37 AM 
|
|
