Month: December 2008

A friend used the phrase completely “white” services to describe internet music projects that are pure as the driven snow on a legal level. It’s about being unsuable. I was struck by this wording because it pinned down an idea that needed a name.

I think that both Rhapsody and CC Mixter would fit, while Hype Machine, LimeWire and Girl Talk would be excluded.

Following up on the thread about Amazon’s MP3 sales in its first year of business, Finance Geek concludes that:

• Few people care about copyright protection, which was supposed to be Amazon’s main selling point.
• And we think many people — the kind of people who pay for music online, at least — still prefer iTunes’ easy, all-in-one music shopping/playing/iPod management experience, versus buying music on the Web and having it imported into iTunes.

It’s true that users don’t care about DRM, but they very much care about being able to shop around, and DRM locks them into a single vendor for every part of their stack for all time.

Buy a Sandisk MP3 player instead of an iPod and DRM becomes impossible. Prefer Windows Media Player to iTunes and you can’t use the iTunes music store any more. Get an eMusic subscription. Try to get rid of Quicktime on your Windows machine. And on and on. Do any of a million little things and you find yourself outside the town limits of Apple’s Celebration USA.

…with a big stack of DRMd files that have become worthless in an instant. You can’t even sell them used to somebody who’s still in the Apple stack, like you can with MP3s.

Don’t underestimate the power of Amazon’s market share. Every single vendor outside of Apple has a common interest in interoperability with one another. Amazon was able to become the #2 download vendor in large part because the lack of DRM made its downloads interoperable with portable music devices and smart phones aside from Apple’s. Ensuring that there is a user-friendly download store adds value for every other vendor outside of Apple. It makes SanDisk more valuable to users, it adds value to Nokia music phones and Windows Media Player. And vice versa — the more Nokias that get sold, the more important Amazon’s music store is.

Just across the border from Apple’s Celebration USA is not just Amazon, but *everybody*, including all the network effects.

Lack of DRM is not Amazon’s main selling point and never was. Interoperability with every device and bit of software ever is the selling point. And what they have accomplished with this selling point is substantial. 10% of this market is not chump change.

Check out this bit in the Leftsetz letter about the web strategy of a rock star named Corey Smith:

You can buy the tracks on iTunes. They’ve sold 420,000 so far. When they experimented last summer, and took the free tracks down from Corey’s site, iTunes sales went DOWN! So, they put the free tracks back up.

This tidbit struck me as confirming a recent bit of conversation here about iTunes sales being a tipping behavior. In conversation about the move from album sales to to singles sales, somebody suggested that listeners get their everyday music from filesharing networks and other free sources. What they bother to buy on the iTunes music store are the standouts, songs that are special to them.

Which suggests a tipping kind of behavior where listeners fall in love with songs they downloaded for free, then give back to the artist by buying a copy. Or maybe they don’t see it as “giving back” or “tipping”, maybe they’re just creating a moment of personal connection by sending a cash-o-gram.

Your mileage may vary. But it’s an interesting possibility. If I worked at a label I’d look into studying this behavior to see the magnitude and factors that affect it. Getting a thank-you (autogenerated) email from the musician might have an unexpectedly large impact, for example.

Cringely thinks that The Google’s motivation to do Chrome is fear that that Microsoft will turn off ads in IE:

Microsoft can do pretty much whatever it wants in this area. There is plenty of browser competition. They can hobble their own product if they like, though it would drive users away from IE — from a product that brings Microsoft no direct revenue anyway — so what’s the risk?

Microsoft turns off the ads in IE and what happens? Google takes a huge revenue hit, is knocked down three pegs in the eyes of Wall Street, while pretty much nothing happens to Microsoft, which would have just shown the world who is still the sheriff.

I am not saying this is going to happen, but I AM saying that it COULD happen — and that very remote possibility is, by itself, enough to make Google have to produce its own browser.

This is a fun premise for a potboiler, but M$ wouldn’t do it because it would drive developers into Apple’s arms, and Apple is coming on very strong.

I imagine that the best reason to do Chrome is in the finance, though I don’t have the data on where that is in their balance sheet. But, for example, Google pays big bucks to companies that sell PCs to pre-install Google Desktop aka Gadgets. I imagine this is overall for strategic reasons and not for day to day revenues. However once those thingies are pre-installed there are a lot of revenue opportunities. Firefox makes a living on search referral fees from Google, and Google is losing that money by having Firefox pre-installed with Desktop rather than Chrome. The major expense for Google is probably paying for distribution rather than developing the browser, so given that they’re already laying down the money, why not send the user into a Google property?

But whatever. IMO this is Goog jumping the shark, but so what. I realize that I am totally on my own in this. A lone voice in the wilderness. A guy with a battery powered megaphone reading out the old testament on a busy street. Just remember you heard it hear first when Google comes for your liver.

Commenter #1:

Isn’t Google Chrome just using the same rendering engine (Webkit) as Safari so you don’t have to test a site with Chrome if it works with Safari

Commenter #2:

the answer to your question is “no”. Web browsers are more than just a rendering engine. Chrome, for example, has an entirely different JavaScript engine than Safari so if you employ any JS at all in your site, you can’t rely on it working across browsers. They also use an entirely different graphics sub-system. I’m sure there are other large components that are different too.

Even if they all used the same JS engine, Graphics sub-systems, layout modules, parsers, storage systems, networking libraries, etc, you’d still have the problem that they’re not all using the same versions of those components.

Webkit is just a small piece of those browsers. It’s an important piece, but it’s not the whole story so, no, one Webkit-based browser is not the same as another Webkit-based browser.

And how is it good for the world for web sites like Google to own the browser? Won’t they use browser dominance to disadvantage web competitors like Yahoo?

Making high-quality software is hard. Every feature is a promise to the user that you’ll fix the bugs, and to keep your promises you have to minimize the number that you make.

I’m not supporting the Chrome browser.

If there are bugs, they belong either to Google or to the users. Google can make its browser similar enough to the others that I don’t have to do special work for it. The users can switch to a better browser.

Let’s say you can buy a new CD for $15 and sell it used for $5. And let’s say that you can buy that same CD in MP3 format for $10 but you can’t sell it used at all.

If you could sell an MP3 used, wouldn’t you be willing to pay more in the first place? Like, for example, $15?

What I’m thinking about is how much a secondary market for MP3s could do to grow recording industry revenues as a whole. It could be enough to have a substantal impact.

See also: insane-tastic startup with annoying name

See also: CNet story