brando

Retail Goes Digital As Best Buy Gobbles Up Napster for $127M

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.

Best Buy and Napster: Combination Is Doomed

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.

Universal Music Group Readies DRM-Free Music, Sans iTunes

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.

Universal Music Group Readies DRM-Free Music, Sans iTunes

Dear Seeking Alpha,

Please put a spell checker in the comment boxes.

(Thanx)

Universal Music Group Readies DRM-Free Music, Sans iTunes

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.