Why Rhapsody Needs More Than Just Napster To Flourish

Rhapsody yesterday announced the acquisition of long term rival Napster from US retailer Best Buy.  Rhapsody will retire the Napster brand and migrate the customer base over to its own service, with Best Buy gaining a minority stake in Rhapsody. It is a somewhat poignant end to one of digital music’s old guard, going out [...]

Making Freemium Pay: An Artist’s Perspective

With the much anticipated US launch of Spotify and the successful IPO of Pandora there’s a very palpable sense of momentum in streaming music.  And that’s great news, the future of music revenues will depend upon a successful transition from distribution based models (downloads, CDs etc) to consumption-era models (on-demand streaming etc.).  Yet, there’s a [...]

Music Subscriptions: Dead or Alive?

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks] [Posted by Mark Mulligan] Follow me on Real Networks [...]

Why Napster’s New Pricing Strategy is More than Just Price Cuts

Napster has overhauled its pricing strategy in the US, selling pre-stored value cards in retail stores. It’s being widely reported as ‘Napster slashing prices’ but it’s more than just that.  The key things of note here are: It shifts the consumer focus onto downloads: each card has a pre-stored value for MP3 downloads as the [...]

100% MP3, 100% Late (though hopefully not too late)

Oh the sweet irony – back in the days of the original Napster the major record labels refused to countenance that MP3 was the new format of choice for the digital generation and refused to license content for distribution via MP3.  Now ten years on we have the”MP3 100% Compatible” logo / campaign from seven [...]

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 [...]