Judge OKs Tivo-In-The-Clouds: Hosted DVR services — which allow cable companies to create “virtual” Tivos that live in a datacenter somewhere, not on a hard drive in your living room — are legally sound. Specifically, network-based DVRs “would not directly infringe plaintiffs’ exclusive rights to reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works,” says the [...]
Category Archives: business
Indies were warm in the first place
July 29, 2008 – 9:35 am
Some indies are selling more records than ever while the majors limp along:
Major labels struggle to keep platinum sellers (acts that sell a million units) from backsliding to gold (500,000 units) or worse. But some smaller labels—among them Sub Pop, Merge, and Matador—have hit a pocket of relative prosperity, with many of their top stars [...]
upsales
July 28, 2008 – 1:42 pm
Elemental Consulting on pay-per-download songs:
If Amazon has a hard time making money on music priced a little below iTunes standard pricing, how can downloads priced at a fraction of the cost be profitable for indie labels and musicians?
Applying the concept of loss leaders … it logically requires that the download is then just the gateway [...]
Piracy is dead
July 27, 2008 – 10:40 am
Unauthorized distribution has already been factored into the music economy. Valuations have been adjusted. The economic impact of filesharing is complete.
When Napster happened, it was a surprise to the music industry. The techies saw it coming but the music people didn’t. This hurt many people with investments in the music business. [...]
Myspace music / Amazon deal
July 25, 2008 – 10:59 am
In the upcoming Myspace Music launch, Amazon is likely to be the provider for paid downloads. This is per TechCrunch:
The as-yet unlaunched MySpace Music will likely partner with Amazon to handle all music ecommerce transactions, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Apple and Rhapsody are also bidding for the business, however, and one source says [...]
eMusic economics
July 17, 2008 – 11:00 pm
hypebot does the numbers on eMusic:
eMusic collects 30 or 40 cents per track downloaded. Because some subscribers don’t download their monthly allotment, eMusic pays 30-35 cents per download. From that 35 cents most labels pay 10-20% to a distributor. Using 15%, that means the distributor pays that label 29.75 cents per track. The current statutory [...]
benefits of song pages
July 17, 2008 – 5:51 pm
Reblogging elemental-consulting on how dedicated pages add value to single songs:
while I buy digital music on a regular basis, I still love the idea of CDs- something tangible that gives me more than just the music - liner notes, pictures, lyrics, all the writing/production credits etc. There’s no doubt in my mind that the advent [...]
netlabels and webcasting contrasted with on-demand
July 14, 2008 – 5:19 pm
Here are David Porter’s calculations on the health of webcasting as a business:
Internet radio revenues, however, were estimated at a mere $92,000,000 — not so impressive. A quick bit of math is revealing: $92m/4.85bn = $0.0190 per hour. That is to say, revenue/hour was just shy of 2 cents. Unfortunately, the [...]