Media - what is it good for…

The music space news keeps coming.  MySpace is launching a music service with 3 out of the 4 majors on board (EMI curiously sitting this one out).  It could obviously have a huge impact and you have to believe that Facebook will do the same thing.  It will likely not have that much effect on Apple/iTunes but [...]

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Ian Rogers announced today that he is leaving Yahoo to become CEO of Topspin Media.  The company is co-founded by Peter Gotcher who was the co-founder of digidesign and subsequently became a VC (IVP/Redpoint) and is now a private investor.  Ian headed up Yahoo’s music and video offerings as far as I can tell.  Peter has a [...]

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It seemed like an April fools joke but apparently it’s true that EMI has hired Douglas Merrill, the CIO of Google.  Hopefully this will lead to something interesting! As I (and others) said before new business models are required to revive the music industry and to date the labels’ efforts to take their collective business out of a nose dive seem very [...]

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The Wall St Journal has an article this morning saying that Google will launch an ad-supported music service in China.  This is in part a response to Baidu’s lead in the Chinese market (where a large share of the searches are for music on the web) but could also be a harbinger of things to [...]

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Yahoo has apparently sold its music service to Real. This is obviously unrelated to the MS bid for Yahoo but as a subscriber to Yahoo’s music service it’s sad to see. It does beg the question whether music subscription services are heading for bit bucket. With the advent of DRM-free music being [...]

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Backing up your data is a pain.  And so not many people do.  This is very broken in this day and age when hard drives are cheap.  Jeremy tells you why you should.  Add to this that more people have more DRM’d data on their hard drive.  In theory it’s no harder to back up [...]

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Music is popular. U2 has a product people want and I think they are monetizing it quite effectively. And they should be concerned about people stealing their music. It is not right. However, this is just absurd. Techdirt makes some good points about how the economic argument put forth [...]

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The end of DRM for music is a great thing!  As I said before DRM is a road-block to reviving music sales and to new business models in the music industry  (Ian Rogers says it very eloquently here).  The king is dead!  Long live the king!
One symptom of the battle for supremacy in the music [...]

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Slacker is a new competitor on the internet audio scene.  They have a couple of key differentiating features:

Advertising supported streaming radio.  This can be upgraded to no advertisements by paying a monthly fee.
A music player (not out yet) that gets content from satellite or wifi (whichever is available).   The player is not yet shipping so [...]

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So everything has probably already been said about the news that EMI will be making their catalogue available without DRM but no one seems to talking about the fact that they are now using 256 kbps AAC.  It’s been a while since the music industry has pushed quality and I think this is a healthy [...]

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