Sopa Highlights Media Industry Strategic Failings

The controversial US copyright and piracy acts Sopa and Pipa (see this Wired piece for a Bluffer’s Guide on what they are) have been thrust centre stage by Wikipedia’s planned protest black-out on Wednesday.  It has taken an entity the size of Wikipedia to bring the debate out of the confines of the digerati and [...]

Competing With Digital Music’s Triple A

Over the last two years the digital music stores-and-services-marketplace has consolidated and – with a few notable exceptions – stagnated. And as the likes of Comes With Music, Spiral Frog and imeem added to the ever growing list of failed but innovative start-ups, the queue of new entrants grew ever smaller.  Successive failures – due [...]

Monkeying Around With Mobile Music (Updated)

Today the triumvirate of Universal Music, UK broadcaster Channel 4 and UK mobile operator Orange announced a Pay As You Go (PAYG) mobile music service called Monkey.  The service is aimed squarely at younger consumers, which matches the demographic of PAYG users and Channel 4’s audience.  The underlying principle of the service is that it [...]

Spotify, Scratching Beneath the Surface of the Numbers

The Financial Times today report that Spotify has 250,000 UK Internet Users have downloaded the streaming music application, and 800,000 worldwide. Not bad for an application which has only recently just stopped being invite-only. I’ve posted before on why Spotify has been so successful, now we have some numbers to measure that success by. First [...]

Spotify: Why It’s Been So Successful and What it Needs to do Next

I first spoke to the guys at Spotify a good few months ago and I have to confess to thinking at the time that they were just another digital music start-up. In fact, it was worse than that, I thought they were potentially another doomed digital music start-up if they didn’t revise their strategy. On [...]

MTV Put Their Well Learnt Lessons into Practice

Compare and contrast: Viacom and YouTube: $1 billion copyright infringement suit pending MTV and MySpace: innovative solution to serve ads on MTV videos   The quote from MTV’s president of global digital media Mika Salmi says it all “MySpace has always respected copyright and is more progressive about copyright in our mind. The way we’re [...]

Beatles About to Go Digital?

Looks like the Beatles are finally going to go digital, but not via iTunes, rather in Rock Band the video game: http://www.edge-online.com/news/beatles-rock-band-announce-coming If Apple Corp are taking this first step, don’t be surprised to see downloads in the not too distant future, though I’ll wager they won’t be with the other Apple first…

Datz Music Lounge: What it Means for Apple

Datz Music Lounge hit the newswires today.  There’s plenty of skepticism about it but I’d advise not to get too hung up on the caveats (i.e. that it only has a couple of the majors, won’t include many new releases and requires a 100 quid up front payment).  This is as big a deal as [...]