How ’bout this flurry of activity as the music industry desperately tries to hang on as customers continue to demand change:
- Last.fm offering free streaming of millions(?) of tracks has also
just announced that they will also offer streaming simulcasts of CBS Radio stations (sister division) - imeem cutting deals with all the majors with other “gray” services being coerced into similar deals
- MySpace Music‘s announcement today about offering free streams (from 3 of the 4 majors) and selling both DRM’d and DRM free tracks
- Nokia‘s “Comes with Music” offering (aka “the hardware tax”)
- Apple‘s rumored discussions around their own subscription plans (“hardware tax”)
- Omniphone’s music subscription as bundled with wireless plan service in Europe (“wireless tax”)
- Universal Music Group‘s “Total Music” plan(s) that are still unclear (“hardware tax”?)
- Warner Music Group‘s
announcement last week that they hired Jim Griffin to drive and promote
a service offering that would be bundled with your ISP bill (aka “the
ISP tax”) - MP3 Search Engines (aka “information retrieval tools”) and online storage lockers, like Seeqod and MP3tunes, being sued by major record labels
- New playlisting and music services popping up daily (see Muxtape and Mixwit)
- Other services getting acquired (Foxytunes, Qloud) while others close up shop (Ezmo)
- XM & Sirius merging
- EMI hires ex-Google CIO to head up their digital division
- Yahoo and MTV shedding their subscription music services (to Rhapsody)
- Yahoo
Music VP, Ian Rogers, decided to move on to a new job focused on the
*creation* side of the industry… presumably because the consumption
side is such a mess? - AOL farming out their radio programming (and presumably royalty liabilities) to CBS Radio
- Amazon
is now the second biggest digital music retailer, but iTunes is now the
biggest music retailer (digital or physical) surpassing Wal-Mart
My thanks to musick in the head for the post.
