Book publishers itching to raise the prices on their e-books should pay attention to the music labels, which raised the prices on their downloads last spring. Consumers, it turns out, like paying less for stuff.
A former Universal Music executive, now headed to Yahoo, explains concisely why his former employer and the other big guys are just playing out the string: CD sales are wasting away, and the digital boost they were counting on simply isn’t big enough.
Former Google sales boss Tim Armstrong has brought a slew of former colleagues with him to AOL, but this may be his highest-profile hire so far: Dave Eun, who has been in charge of content deals at Google and YouTube, will replace Bill Wilson, one of the last high-profile AOL guys from the pre-Armstrong era.
The music industry’s decline has been so prolonged that this now qualifies as a man-bites-dog story: Sony says its music sales actually went up, just a bit, in the last quarter. Thank Michael Jackson and Susan Boyle.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong turned in his first earnings report as CEO of the newly independent company this morning. And his numbers don’t look anything like the ones he was used to reporting at Google–revenue plummeted across the board.
Then again, Wall Street has minimal expectations for AOL for at least a couple quarters, so Armstrong doesn’t need to do much to meet them.
After factoring out one-time charges, AOL posted earnings of 71 cents per share on revenue of $810 million. Wall Street expected earnings of either 62 cents or 66 cents per share, depending on who you ask, on revenue of around $766 million.
Amazon caved to Macmillan’s demands on e-book pricing, and now the online retailer is set to give News Corp.’s HarperCollins a new deal too, says Rupert Murdoch. Meanwhile, don’t hold your breath waiting for Conan O’Brien on Fox.
DVD sales are collapsing, nearly as quickly as music sales did over the last decade. Just ask MGM, which saw sales drop off a very steep cliff in just a couple of years. And remember this when you hear talk of Hollywood’s resurgence or the coming boom in 3-D.
Look who has learned one of the most important lessons of the music industry’s love-hate relationship with iTunes: Apple. It shows in Steve Jobs’s approach to book publishers, which is designed to assuage their fear that e-books will cannibalize their old business.
Don’t know if this qualifies as a parable. But at the very least, it’s interesting: An iPhone app developer has figured out how to combat the burgeoning problem of iPhone app piracy–by embracing the pirates.
A few thousand copies of GQ magazine in iPhone form won’t turn Condé Nast around. But it’s a start, and it’s a good bet that the company’s first Apple tablet apps will look awfully similar.
No surprise: A study financed by Yahoo says that Yahoo ads helped a customer sell more stuff. A big surprise: The same study says the ad only works on people born before Woodstock.
The movie studios–along with consumer electronics manufacturers–hope that “Avatar” has convinced you that 3-D is something you’d like to see at home, too. DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg makes his pitch.
The political (but not just political!) site has a lot of eyeballs, and now needs revenue to match. That’s up to newish ad boss Greg Coleman, who’s bringing in a group from his old employer in Sunnyvale.
Tim Armstrong has a very long To Do list at AOL. But unless he can turn his sales problem around, none of the other stuff will matter very much.
As predicted, online retailers did well during the holiday season. Actually, a little bit than predicted, according to comScore. The Web-tracking service predicted a three percent bump in sales and is now reporting that sales jumped by five percent in the last two months of the year. That’s $27 billion and change, all told.
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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