Last month, Warner Music Group won the right to sell ads on its YouTube videos. Next step: Getting someone to sell ads on its YouTube videos, since the music label doesn’t have its own sales team. The plan: Hand those duties over to someone who’s already doing it for Veoh and other video outfits.
Vevo, the music industry’s attempt to create a Hulu-like hub for its videos, is going to attract a lot of eyeballs when it launches later this year. Here’s the guy who’s supposed to attract advertisers: David Kohl, a former Nokia executive who starts work today as the site’s sales boss.
This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…
Warner Music Group’s digital sales have been slowing for the past few quarters. And since digital sales are tied closely to sales of new Apple products, that could get worse for Warner–and the rest of the music business–in the next few months.
If demand for Apple products slackens a bit–perhaps because the company doesn’t have a compelling new iPod, or perhaps because everyone who wants an iPod has one, or perhaps because the economy is terrible–then the same thing will happen to digital growth.
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.
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.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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