Category: .

My hat is off to LaLa. Nobody believed in it. It looked like they were going to get the hook, and now they have pulled a rabbit out of a hat. It’s magic.

Labels size up Web 2.0 music services | Digital Media – CNET News:

No [web 2.0 music company] has impressed more music execs than Lala.

Lala began as a CD-swapping service but now offers a hybrid business model. Lala enables users to upload their existing music libraries into Lala’s digital jukebox. This gives customers the ability to listen to their songs for free from any Web-enabled device. The company also gives visitors the chance to listen to all of the site’s music free of charge–one time. Lala then charges 10 cents for unlimited replay of each song. The user can then apply the 10 cents to acquire a DRM-free copy, which costs 89 cents.

The beauty of this is that Lala gets its hands on people’s credit card numbers and positions itself to generate impulse buys, ala iTunes. Paying 10 cents to listen to new music doesn’t sound very harmful does it?

According to a LaLa co-founder Bill Nguyen, among the users who have provided a credit card, on average they buy 180 songs for every 1,000 they listen to on the site.

“These are the kinds of numbers we like to see,” said one executive. “When you’re talking about the customer value, you have to preserve the retail model to some extent. The online ad business is not going to drive the customer value in this environment. We’re looking for a blend of monetized sampling and discovery and sales conversion.”

That’s what Lala appears to be delivering.

Quotes from a really excellent story about the state of the newspaper business.

The calamities generating headlines are about debt — not operations.

In related news, EMI has done a good job of growing revenues, but their owners at Terra Firma have had to write off half of the huge investment they made in the company. It’s a corporate organizational issue, not a product failure.

down-market popular newspapers that have a low reliance on advertising (25-35 percent) and a low investment in editorial quality are better weathering the economic storm.

That is, not all music products are down. Bars can still grow their nightly revenues by having the right bands.

Focus mental bandwidth behind digital business models — not evolving suddenly into something that is not in the DNA of your company or national market.

Let record companies be record companies.

what’s needed is a migration away from selling print ads to the real estate sector toward evolving the newspaper into the role of marketing services agency to the real estate sector.

Don’t sell ads, be a marketing services agency.

The web page at http://learningmusic.cashmusic.org/ is a really well done piece of web packaging for music. The page layout is flowing and open, the text gives context and romance to the music, the player is seamlessly integrated with the page, and the graphic shows the expressive part of the music without overwhelming the functional requirements of the page as a web app.

The one flaw I notice is that there are no direct links to individual songs. You can stream them, and you can download a zip file with all of them, but you can’t download one at a time or deep link to them.

Music industry: licensing is a problem, but how to fix it? – Ars Technica:

These two panels made it clear that nearly everyone in the music business recognizes that the complexities of getting legal access to music was harming the business as a whole. But it was also obvious that there are people in the business that hope the licensing can change without any impact on their corner of the industry, and that everyone involved is still looking to get their cut from any new technology that comes along. The sort of pessimism this engenders was probably best voiced by DiMA’s Jon Potter. “The fact that the law is driving the business is a problem,” he said. “The fact that we’re sitting here saying the same things year after year is a problem.”

The fact that people are sitting there year after year without coming up with solutions is a problem that will solve itself.

It may even *have* to solve itself. Each faction has enough legal ammunition to fight the other factions to a standstill for its share of the pie, but lacks the whozamawhatsit to make the pie big enough to keep them all alive on their shares. As the pie shrinks some pieces become too small to sustain their owners, so that some factions will drop off and the overall equation will change. For example, physical retailers don’t have the influence anymore to make life hard on their digital competitors, and that’s allowing digital vendors to get better deals.

(Links via @MixMatchMusic).

I wonder whether the internet is contributing to the economic collapse by automating more and more people out of work.

From a blog about real estate in my area:

With online tools like Zillow, Redfin, Property Shark, Dataquick, Melissa Data, Realty Trac, Foreclosure Radar and now, Los Angeles Blockshopper, access to coveted “Realtor” information is now at your fingertips. Anyone can now do their own research and be better prepared to enter into transactions. All of these are available in my Real Estate TOOLS/DATA Section. Throw in real estate blogs like Dr.Housing Bubble, Patrick.Net, WestsideBubble, etc., and people have a public forum by which experience and pertinent information can be exchanged.

Exactly how much, do we need realtors today?

Per Hypebot, terrestrial broadcasters have gotten a big rate reduction on webcasting, while web-only casters have no deal at all. I assume this is because terrestrial radio has a big bargaining chip in that record labels want terrestrial radio to pay more royalties.

rates for simulcasts or web channels operated by local radio stations are reduced 16% in 2009 then gradually increase through 2015 – from $0.0015 per streamed sound recording in 2009 to $0.0025 per stream by 2015.

Terrestrial radio already gets higher prices for its advertising than online radio, because it has better penetration in the local markets that the advertisers are trying to reach. So it’s now going to be paying less in royalties at the same time that it’s earning more in advertising.

In related previous news, Yahoo and AOL both killed their homegrown webcasting operations in favor of outsourcing to CBS. One would wonder what’s in it for CBS, given that it should be working with the same impossible economics as Yahoo and AOL, but apparently CBS pays lower royalties than they do.

Techies may get a warm feeling from the fact that Last.fm is a CBS property, so there’s a competitive piece of music software in the mix. CBS is also the major backer of Targetspot, the major broker of webcasting ad inventory. Targetspot bought Ronning Lipset, the major ad sales firm for webcasting ad inventory.

So don’t get all web 2.0 on that shit. It’s not like print publishing and advertising where organizations like the New York Times are crumbling. With online music the old school radio world is making big moves.

Well, ok, it’s not all great news for CBS. I have heard that terrestrial stations are seeing the writing on the wall about the end of their business, though I don’t know enough about their business to be able to judge the truth of it. But let’s say it’s true, and let’s also say that the online picture looks pretty damn good for CBS. The overall picture is of a pre-cloud giant making a very credible move into the cloud.

PlayTwitter now has adapters for two URL shorteners used for music, song.ly and tra.kz. Any time it sees a link from one of them it will get a play button going, just as if they were direct links to files with the .mp3 extension.

What I’m trying to do is to be purely a connector. It’s a fun and interesting role.

Every once in a while you’ll get in a virtuous feedback loop with some development project. When that happens people are bouncing an idea back and forth in a series of related but independent hacks.

Check out Ty White’s very awesome demo video of how to use playtwitter.

Google is abandoning its project to sell ads in terrestrial radio, and it’s moving to sell ads in online audio. That makes sense on the face of it, I guess, but most online audio ads are part of a package deal that includes terrestrial radio.

So I don’t totally get it. But still, my hat is off to the googlers for both taking chances and knowing when to retreat.