Media - what is it good for…

Congrats to Peter Gotcher and the rest of the folks at Topspin!  We need more companies like this one that are actually trying to do something positive for the recording industry.   And I think Topspin might win the coolest cover picture for a company launch.  Follow the link and check it out.  I could [...]

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By now it’s fairly well-known that selling digital music downloads is a tough business with thin margins. However, across both online as well as brick-and-mortar retailing, music and video is being used more universally as a loss leader and it’s not clear what this trends means for content in general. For example:

for Apple, [...]

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Live Mesh was introduced yesterday by Microsoft.  It is the brain child of Ray Ozzie and really seems like an out-growth of the work he did with Groove.  At its simplest, Live Mesh is basic file sync.  But another way to think about Live Mesh is as the ultimate P2P platform.  When people think of [...]

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Fred Wilson has a post this morning about streaming audio services on the web.  Fred’s point is that streaming music is changing how people listen to and discover music on the web and that this type of use will accelerate.  And I agree with that.  But some fundamental problems still exist with streaming music.  For one the [...]

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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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Here we go.  I am amazed that there is not more outrage about this.  Don’t people care about the civil liberties?  This is so over the top.  BPI says that ISPs should stop hiding “behind bogus privacy arguments”.  What is bogus about privacy?  It seems fundamental to democracy and the way we live.  And ISPs [...]

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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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