SpiralFrog, an ad-supported, free music download site, is having a hard time selling the idea. Revenues for its third quarter came to a paltry $20,400, but it had little problem losing $3.4 million. No worries. Executives say all this can be fixed with a little "gorilla [sic]" marketing. [PaidContent]
As CNET points out, it's all about the business ties. U2 lead singer Bono is the most stylish managing director at Elevation Parters, the Sand Hill private equity firm. Elevation cofounder Marc Bodnick is on the board of directors of iLike. Hence, the arrangement. Bonus for close students of the Valley's real social networks: Marc Bodnick's wife is Michelle Sandberg, the sister of Google executive Sheryl Sandberg, who's married to former Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg, who's an iLike advisor. Got that?
Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman, in a startling change of heart, proclaimed that the music industry is, at least partly, to blame for its current woes, mentioning something about a misplaced war with consumers. With that off his chest, Bronfman launched into a full-fledged groveling routine, proclaiming Apple's iTunes store a paragon of digital music. He went on and on, praising the genius of selling individual tracks, the user interface, and billing platform. Bronfman even threw unnecessary praise towards the iPhone — like we need to hear from a music guy what makes for a good cell phone. Why all the posterior-smooching? Bronfman is realizing that tough talk isn't helping it get out of "indecent" pricing schemes when it comes time to renew Warner's contract with Apple.
Two weeks ago I ran a gantlet of pushy ads to buy local nightclub tix from Live Nation, the Beverly Hills-based event promoter for whom Madonna dumped her record label. Now, Live Nation is spamming my private inbox with a fat HTML brochure. The baloney line: "You have received this email because you are a member of the Live Nation mailing list, which you joined free of charge and without any obligation when you previously provided your email address to us in connection with the purchase of tickets." Yes, of course I checked every opt-out button. Yes, I knew they'd add me to their list anyway. But I really wanted to see Debbie Harry and I'm too busy to futz with multiple email addresses. Coming up on Boing Boing: How this new business model for musicians is so much better for me than shopping at Tower Records.
To the relief of Steve Jobs, the Beatles finally plan to let their music go digital in 2008, Paul McCartney told Billboard. Boom! McCartney says the holdup was contractual, but other reports suggest the last hurdle to bringing the Beatles online was resistance from the estate of George Harrison. But his music went online in October and his widow, Olivia Harrison, said she expects the Beatles to go digital in 2008.
Warner Music CEO and antipiracy crusader Edgar Bronfman has admitted that the recording industry shares some of the blame for the proliferation of file sharing. "We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding," he said at a mobile conference in Asia. "We were wrong." No, really? Bronfman relayed how the music business's "glacial" adoption of the digital era inadvertently started a war by denying consumers what they wanted. One would think Bronfman, an entrepreneur, would have realized all this a little sooner. But then again, the music business has never actually been about pleasing the customer.
Snocap, the peer-to-peer music store started by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, is losing money, staff, founders, and partners. Not to mention money. So what's its new gambit, after licensing peer-to-peer technology and building MySpace stores both flopped? Enter BoomShuffle, a Web widget for creating music mixes using content from the Snocap store. It sounds less like a music product than a startup strategy, though. What do you do when your first two business plans fail? Why, you boomshuffle them! It's the game every entrepreneur can play! Unfortunately for Snocap, I suspect the deck is stacked against it.
Microsoft wants to buy Musiwave, a company specializing in mobile music services. The deal, among other things, would lay the foundation for a Zune wireless store, matching Apple's iTunes Store for Wi-Fi that lets iPhone and iPod Touch users download songs over the air. This copycat move is just one more sign of what's wrong with Microsoft's Zune strategy. It can't settle on one — so it just winds up latching onto whatever is the hot topic of the day. Here's what Microsoft should be doing instead of copying Apple.
Last month, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker told the nation's governing bodies they needed to make intellectual property theft a priority. Well, the House is fed up with the public berating and is finally doing something. A proposed education bill threatens to withhold federal aid from colleges and universities that don't proactively deter file sharing. Along with technical countermeasures, like network throttling, campuses will be asked to find file-sharing alternatives that will eventually wean students off their illicit ways. In other words: Force educational institutions to subsidize Napster's shareholders.
Mathematical types might object, but to me the evidence is clear. British music fans are 8 percent better than Americans and 10 percent better than the rest of the world.
Colombian rock star Juanes sold more than 6 million songs during his new album's digital prerelease. The sales set a record, according to Universal Music, which distributed the songs via legitimate Internet and mobile vendors. People actually paid for music. Good for Juanes; better, hopefully, for the digital consumer. It's not that music execs are wholly clueless. For a hits-driven industry, sales speak much louder than anticopyright zealots' rhetoric. it's that they haven't had enough success stories like this one to persuade them to buy into the digital marketplace.
Last we heard about Radiohead's experiment to let people pay what they want for its latest album, "In Rainbows," we were ready to bury record labels. We heard the average price paid for "In Rainbows" fell between $5 and $8 and that a low estimate of Radiohead's take in two days was $6 million. But now ComScore's come out with official numbers, and, um, whoops.
All the attention might be on Facebook's advertising aspirations, the Microsoft investment, and Google's OpenSocial initiative. But don't think Facebook has forgotten about MySpace, which still has a lock on the music market, thanks to bands which discovered the site as a way to connect with fans. One report has Facebook launching a long-rumored platform for musicians at the Ad:Tech conference.
Warner Music is threatening to pull out of Apple's iTunes, continuing the trend started by an angsty Universal Music Group. Record labels and Hollywood studios alike are upset by Apple's inflexibility on pricing. Warner's contract is up at year's end, and is considering a switch to a month-to-month deal, as Universal has done. [Washington Post]
Engadget founder and newly married uberhipster Peter Rojas's Internet-only music label RCRD LBL will launch this November. Creative director Elliot Aronow parrots what little has been revealed of the venture: a network of ad-supported online music labels and blogs offering free, exclusive music from artist both famous and unknown. He should have thrown in "It's like a filtered YouTube" for good measure. [PSFK]
