branson

18 Comments

    • MySpace Aims to Be the Jukebox of Our Internet Existence [view article]
      All these "free" music sites are crap IMO. The user experience sucks. When are people going to realize you get what you pay for? Music is in demand, therefore it has value. The paid subscription sites like Rhapsody and Napster where you get all the music all the time without the BS blow away the competition. Sep 27 03:06 PM
    • Retail Goes Digital As Best Buy Gobbles Up Napster for $127M [view article]
      This is NOT a good deal for Napster shareholders. Management cut a sweet deal for itself taking almost 10% of the total deal price in personal payouts in exchange for GIVING the company away at less than 0.4x revenue. This is a travesty and somebody needs to get the Feds involved. This kind of CEO theft from shareholders in exchange for value destruction and incompetance has to stop. Please do some diligence, discover the truth and modify your story. Sep 17 12:19 PM
    • Best Buy and Napster: Combination Is Doomed [view article]
      You obviously don't understand what is going on in the digital music space. You and just about every journalist and blogger capable of fogging a mirror think Apple actually offers a good value proposition and nothing else matters. Apple has nice hardware and their software interface works well -- as long as you play by their rules using their equipment. But the real reason Apple has succeeded is because the iPod and iPhone are nothing more than well concealed intellectual property burglary kits. If you don't get that, you don't know squat about the music biz, pal. Sep 16 11:17 AM
    • Record Companies Starting to Shun iTunes [view article]
      Markham,

      You are correct. The music business cannot survive if things continue in the current direction. The problem is obviously piracy. If people had to procure music legitimately the market would be large enough to support the "new model" everyone seems to think the record labels owe us. Nothing will stop piracy altogether, but our govenrment has a responsibility (one of the few legitimate responsibilities of governement) to allow businesses and people to contol private property. It seems obvious that property laws are not being enforced and the recording industry is punished for this abrogation of duty. Ignore the hecklers from the peanut gallery. Anyone who has listened to an mp3 file believes he is an expert on the economics of producing and distributing music. My fear is that the hecklers are so vocal, and the victims so weak, that the music business will cease to exist before the world realizes what it has killed. BTW, I also agree with you on the best way to procure music. I subscribe to Napster and love it. Cheers.       Aug 30 11:44 AM
    • Rhapsody's New e-Music Download Service Takes on iTunes [view article]
      You obviously don't know much about music, and even less about the music business. Nobody is trying to out-iPod Apple...not Rhapsody, not Napster, not Amazon. These music stores are vying for slices of what is hoped will be a larger overall legal music pie (the real problem is piracy and why the law is not shutting it down -- but I digress). iTunes sales are plateauing as people realize Apple's content is locked by its proprietary DRM into Apple devices. Secondly, you sound like what the technology community refers to as a "fanboy", i.e. neither logic nor reason can infect your love of anything Apple. Lastly, subscription music is not "a really bad idea." I and thousands of others who subscribe to Napster's and Rhapsody's subscription product think it's a really good idea and love the value proposition. What people need to understand is that subscription music isn't necessarily a replacement for owning a collection of music (although I choose to use it in that manner). It drives my home stereo system, my son's stereo in his room, and another system we have by the pool. It also fills and re-fills 3 different mp3 players that my family shares, one of which happens to be my cell phone that also can purchase tracks over the air via ATT. All this for $15 per month. It's the best entertainment value proposition I know. I tried Rhapsody and it's fine, but I like Napster better. They have over 6 million songs and you can purchase them DRM-free if you like. Jul 01 04:50 PM
    • Napster's DRM-Free Music Store Will Struggle [view article]
      I've been a Napster subscriber for over three years and love it. Subscription music is the only way to go as far as I'm concerned. Piracy is not an option and iTunes is not nearly as user friendly as having over 6mm songs available on command. Now I can start a library of DRM-free high bitrate files that I own...but frankly, I don't care. Once you try the subscription route you probably won't want to purchase. Napster's challenge is getting people to try it and realize the potential. May 21 09:59 PM
    • The Music Biz: Something Important Is On The Horizon [view article]
      There is one huge horsefly in the soup: illegal peer to peer file stealing. Why aren't you writing about how this has to be stopped? It's the first and foremost thing necessary to move the digital music space into an environment capable of supporting profitability. All the new so called "business models" cropping up are going to end up burning more VC money than the online bakeries and shoe shine shops funded at the turn of the century. Copyright law must be enforced. We are on a slippery slope that could lead to a long and painful decline of creativity and business application of all things digitally filable. Fans don't steal, thus record labels are not suing fans, just common thieves. Apr 04 12:17 PM
    • CD Sales an Improper Proxy for Measuring Purchased Music Demand [view article]
      The statisitics I have seen do not verify that digital revenue is at all close to making up for lost physical revenue. Although I understand the public's desire to thwart the record labels from forcing them to repurchase their physical music libraries in digital form, that argument does not hold for young people as most have never had physical music libraries. A serious social issue is developing in the current economic environment for music: the sudden lack of respect for property and the law. Almost all music is copyrighted, meaning it generally cannot be copied for an unrelated third party without the creator/owner's permission. Such permission normally requires compensation. It is morally wrong and against the law, illegal, for people to offer their digital music libraries to millions of strangers via peer to peer file "sharing" (really stealing) networks and it is just as illegal to download these files without paying the artists who created them and the record labels who financed them. I am amazed and confused by the popular argument that record companies should not be suing their fans. People who steal your product are not fans. I'm sorry to say, they are nothing more than common thieves who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in order to protect one's rights as a property owner. The situation is entirely out of hand. If public opinion does not change soon, or if the ISPs do not step up and voluntarily filter this illegal content crossing thier networks, congress should intervene and provide statutory relief. Copyright law is the linchpin holding together the greatest movement of creativity the world has ever known -- the U.S. music, record, book and software industries. P2P "sharing" of uncompensated digital files has to be stopped. Apr 04 08:49 AM
    • Universal Music Group Readies DRM-Free Music, Sans iTunes [view article]
      I hear your point about Apple's right to keep its license to itself. After all, I'm a free market libertarian. But it doesn't make long term business sense. More digital music stores capable of selling into the iPod ecosystem would mean more iPods sold. And after all, Apple makes money on the sale of hardware, not the iTunes store. What we have now is near total chaos, unless you are simply a cult-like lover of Apple who would never consider owning a device manufactured by anyone else. What if, in the 1970s, RCA 8-tracks would only play on RCA 8-track players and Motown 8-tracks only played on Motown players? There needs to be a content standard. We're not talking about games here, which are primarily played by a cult-like following of mostly adolescents, were talking about music that virtually everyone listens to. Even if the big labels go out of business the independent labels and/or the artists themselves are going to want to be paid for the IP and I suspect they are going to want a form of DRM. Again, IMO, it is simply wishful and naive thinking to believe DRM will totally go away. There should be a single interoperable hardware-agnostic DRM, and if Apple, who currently owns the "standard" by default, is not willing to license its DRM so it truly becomes the standard then the record labels should do what UMG appears to be doing and cut Apple out until it is forced to play ball. If Apple doesn't play then they should release their content on one DRM only and force Apple to license it. If that happens I suspect the DRM will be PlaysForSure of Microsoft's new DRM, PlayReady. I just don't think DRM is really going away. Lastly, even you admit you don't think this experiment is going to result in much. Well, if iPod owners continue to purchase UMG music via the iTunes store with DRM embedded rather than go to Rhapsody to purchase the same music without DRM I think that's a pretty good indication DRM is not as reviled as many suggest. And I think this is part of the experiment UMG is conducting. Of course, if UMG were to embrace iTunes Plus they would see a big uptick in digital music sales. UMG knows this. That's not the point of the "exercise." I must say that the way you wax so elequently about the seemles and flawless interopeation of the iTunes music store and the iPod one has to question your independence. Anyone who is truly consumer focused would want the most options possible for the consumer. So why not have a single standard for all content so all hardware manufacturers could compete head to head and give us the best product a competitive market is capable of delivering? Yeah, yeah, yeah DRM-free mp3 is single standard but it does not adequately protect the IP. Aug 14 09:23 AM
    • Universal Music Group Readies DRM-Free Music, Sans iTunes [view article]
      Dear Seeking Alpha,

      Please put a spell checker in the comment boxes.

      (Thanx)       Aug 13 11:18 PM
    • Universal Music Group Readies DRM-Free Music, Sans iTunes [view article]
      I have to take exeption with your contention the record labels need Apple more than Apple needs them. Apple has bullied the music industry by not licensing its DRM (called FairPlay) to other music retailers, and only FairPlay-encoded music will play on iPods. This is the main point of contention, in my opinion. If Apple would license its DRM to other music stores like Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo Music, etc. UMG would be back at the bargaining table. Although DRM-free digital music is clearly more valuable to the consumer I believe consumers would consider interoperable DRM-agnostic music almost as valuable as totally DRM-free music. And why shouldn't Apple license its DRM anyway? It only stands to reason that more people would purchase iPods if iPods were capable of playing legal music purchased from sites other than just the iTunes music store. Under today's environment 80% of the music stored on all iPods is of the unprotected mp3 variety and I believe it is a fair guess that most of that is pirated. It will be an interesting test case, indeed, if we see that people continue to purchase UMG DRM-encoded music from the iTunes site rather than DRM-free UMG music from other sites. That would provide evidence consumers' issues are not so much with DRM in and of itself, but rather with the music's ability to operate with their chosen hardware. Such a result could enbolden the record labels to play even harder with Apple to license its DRM to other music stores. The record labels have been behind the curve since the digital music genie slipped out of the bottle, but I cannot have any sympathy for Apple either. Apple should open up the FairPlay license to all legitimate digital music stores. Alternatively, the record companies should band together and force a single interoperable DRM standard upon all retailers of their digital product. I think it is naive to expect a totally DRM-free world. Aug 13 08:37 PM
    • Apple, Listen Up: Asia's Getting Hooked On Mobile Music [view article]
      Why does everyone fawn so over Apple? And why do you care whether they are missing Asia? Apple is so overrated it sorely perplexes me. The hardware is overpriced. You don't really "own" anything of value when you pay $0.99 or $1.29 for their closed system files and you'll have to buy them again when a newer better codec or other technology arrives. And they don't have a subcription option. It is truly a mystery why America is so enamored with the feminine little white boxes that look like a woman's makeup compact. Maybe it's because America has become so feminized overall. Real men subscribe to Napster. Jun 14 08:43 PM
    • Apple: Subscription Music Service Seems Inevitable [view article]
      I have to disagree, Joe. I certainly do not consider myself a DJ, or even an aspiring one, but I am a happy customer (and shareholder) of Napster. For less than I spend on coffee every week (or day, sometimes) I get unlimited access for a month to over 3mm tracks on my PC, home stereo and portable player that I take to the gym. I don't have access to the "music scene" but Napster allows me to easily experiment and try out hundreds of new artists during the marathon sessions I spend in front of my PC doing investment research. To boot, I've become the favorite uncle by giving up the two additional PC/player slots on my subscription to my two nephews. Their parents are glad the boys aren't tempted to subject the family a lawsuit and the boys are happy with Sansa players I purchased for them to fill and refill over and over with whatever it is that kids listen to these days. I think it's pretty much a cinch that the subscription model will carve out at least 10% of the overall retail music market. Apr 24 01:36 PM
    • How Apple Will Frustrate Music Subscription Moguls [view article]
      My head is still spinning from your BS.

      When you pull your head out...into the sunshine...perhaps we can have a conversation about the music business. On second thought, I'm growing bored with your intransigent, religous fervor in favor of Apple and disrespect for the law. Enjoy your investment or employment at Apple whichever it is.

      Most of the non iTunes music on iPods is not ripped directly from CDs. It's from P2P, i.e. pirated. Everyone knows this, including Jobs. Did you hear him stumble all over his himself when discussing this point in the EMI conference call announcing the DRM experiment?

      And BTW, I'm not an employee of the music industry, an investor in WMG or any other label. I just think the public would be well served to know the facts...and to realize the limitations of the iPod's closed system. It's a cute little product, but it isn't the world changer so many dreamers think it is. When all digital music is interoperable across all hardware devices, including one's home and car stereo systems, within the confines of the law, then we will have something to go wild over. Right now we have managed chaos with one very clever player nimble enough to temporarily exploit it while simultaneously hoodwinking the consumer into thinking he has done them a great service. People who think they actually "own" something with those files purchased from iTunes are in for a little surprise when the technology passes them by or they realize the files are only playable on an iPod. That's why I subscribe to Napster. Unlimited access to 3mm tracks and no technology obsolescence issues. I like the service so much I did a Victor Kiam -- own the stock. I recommend you do the same.       Apr 17 01:10 AM
    • How Apple Will Frustrate Music Subscription Moguls [view article]
      There is no doubt EMI will find widespread favor for thier no DRM, higher quality initiative. It remains to be seen, however, if the other labels will see the economic benefit of forever losing any hope of having control over their IP. I think cooler heads will prevail and they will give the consumer what he wants without giving away the store. Yes, the consumer wants, and deserves, interoperability across all hardware platforms and devices. Thanks to Steve Jobs' penchant for control they don't have that now. All he would have to do is license FairPlay to the online record stores such as Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, eMusic, etc. and one very large step in the right direction would have been taken. That was not to his benefit however during the time he was building market share with his superior player. The iTunes music store is not a profit driver at Apple. It is more akin to a loss leader in support of iPod sales. Now that the iPod has achieved success (probably even beyond Jobs' expectations) and competition will soon start nipping away, it behooves Jobs to consider opening his device so that it can play more than just iTunes music (and of course pirated music - estimated to be as much as 97% of all music collectively stored on iPods today!). But instead of taking the logical step of licensing FairPlay Jobs cleverly (some might say sinisterly) positioned himself as the music messiah by advocating DRM-free music and muscling EMI into taking a highly risky maneuver in an effort to retain relevance. Interoperable DRM would benefit consumers AND Apple as the iPod would be able to play music from anywhere. But DRM-free music would be even better for Apple as it would accomplish this AND position Apple as the consumer friendly king maker in the music industry - an invaluable marketing ploy. This time Jobs may have overplayed his hand, however. No one in the music industry wants a single player to have as much control as Apple is trying to position itself to have. I project that forces will align to assure this does not happen. Secondly, as stated above, it is not in the labels' interest to temporarily juice digital sales by dropping DRM only to soon realize they gave away the store. To use an old analogy it would be like a farmer feeding out his seed corn during the winter. Sure, the hogs will enjoy it, but come spring time there will be nothing to plant and nothing to harvest in fall. Consumers who advocate a DRM-free world are acting like the farmer's whining, greedy, pigs squealing for more corn. P2P piracy has temporarily conditioned consumers to believe music should be free and that the record labels are the greedy ones. Perhaps the labels have not conducted themselves in perfect fashion, but as I said above, the law is on thier side. Futhermore, if you think it's so easy to self produce, market and distribute a platinum release then please tell me why it's not happening right and left already. The technology has been available for years and the built up animosity toward the recored companies has been there as well. I don't think I have to spell out the answer to the self production theory - but I will - it's just a little bit harder to pull off than it looks. Interoperable DRM that allows the consumer to do with the music files as he sees fit within the confines of IP law will solve the current problem. It's really that simple. But to completely abandon DRM altogether, the only hope IP owners will ever have of keeping up with piracy technology, would be seed corn suicide. Apr 15 06:48 PM
Loading...
Symbols:
Authors:
Quick Links:
Contribute an Article Become a Seeking Alpha Contributor

Transcripts

More Transcripts»