At Steve Jobs’s insistence, the iTunes music store proposition to customers has always been simple: You pay us 99 cents, you get a song. But that’s starting to change. Today’s new wrinkle: Pay us a premium, and we’ll give you a bunch of songs and some other stuff.
Earlier this month the music business got a rare piece of good news: Apple announced that it had posted “record” sales at its iTunes music store around Christmas. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming: I’m seeing more and more evidence that Apple notwithstanding, the industry’s last few months were bad even by the industry’s own terrible standards.
In addition to offering songs from iTunes without DRM restrictions, Apple plans on selling songs to iPhone users “over the air”–that is, you can buy them directly from your handset, wherever you are. I’m told that Apple has struck deals with the major labels to start selling songs to iPhone 3G owners sometime this spring.
Amazon has been selling digital music from all the big music labels for nearly a year now. It hasn’t changed Apple’s grip on that business in any way, and it hasn’t made any money for Amazon. But don’t write it off as a failure just yet.
This won’t erase the sting of this month’s election, but at this point, every win must feel nice: John McCain’s eldest daughter Sid just got a promotion at EMI Music Group, the big label where she’s worked for many years. She’s now VP of Label Services, which, best as I can tell, means she’ll work with the indie bands that work with EMI’s Caroline arm.
Mobile giant Nokia’s dire warning today–its fourth-quarter sales will be below expectations, and it sees the overall industry contracting in 2009–didn’t just scare investors in mobile/wireless stocks. It also discouraged beaten-down executives in the music industry, who have been hoping that the mobile business will help them crawl out of a very deep hole.
EMI Music Group PLC, which seems to have been going through a continuous reorg since private equity firm Terra Firma bought it in the summer of 2007, has announced yet another one. But the more important message EMI delivered today was to the company’s investors, who have lent it some $5.8 billion: “Don’t worry! We’ve got plenty of cash!”
Hulu for videos? No, but MTV’s new site is a nice, convenient place to watch music clips.
But it’s nice to see it now, regardless: Clean interface, embeddable videos, social networky without actually trying to be a social network.
It’s just too bad we didn’t get to look at it until 2008.
How could the company behind the Beatles and other music legends lose $1.2 billion in 12 months?
We’ll be happy to tell you, says the people who own that company in a 101-page report.
(It’s the financial stylings of EMI Music’s owners: The United Kingdom’s Terra Firma private equity group, which bought the company for some $5 billion in the summer of 2007.)
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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