On Digital Media, Episode #57: Bumpy
In this episode John Federico, Steve Hatch and Ken Gellman discuss:
- Events: Steve may be attending the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in April while John is planning to attend Web 2.0 NY on January 31st to see our friend Craig Calder of Yovia speak on the topic of monetizing social media and word of mouth.
- Yahoo’s continued troubles. The New York Post (always an accurate barometer of happenings in new media. Ahem…) reports that takeover candidates include AOL, AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Microsoft, Viacom and News Corp. (warning: annoying pop-up ads)
- To help save themselves, Yahoo plans to give away DRM-Free MP3 music. It will be ad-supported, of course and will probably reflect a model similar to SpiralFrog, although we’re not so sure how well the model is working for them... Ken would have commented, but he accidentally muted his mic.
- Not surprising, digital music sales are up and CD sales are down. The problem? The intensity of growth in digital is not going to supplant the losses in physical retail.
- Last.fm to offer free music streaming of 3.5 million tracks on-demand. No wating. Unsigned artists will be paid directly by Last.fm and the record companies will share in the advertising revenue. This will be a model to follow.
- Are you bored with the included 58 songs in Rock Band? You can buy more at $2 each on the Xbox Live Marketplace - costing more than 100% more than a track the iTunes Store or the Amazon MP3 Store. Steve points out that if the music industry were a bit more creative, they could find plenty of additional outlets for packaged music.
- Who would - who could - who should - buy the New York Times, should the company be in play? Murdoch? Should the government save it? We think not…
- John Ellis thinks it should be Google. John Battelle thinks that it should be Google.org.
- Steve thinks that a Google/New York Times marriage would be too much of a culture shock for the folks at the Times. John thinks not - the NYT has been making numerous investments including its most recent investment in Automattic.
- Verizon Wireless announces its first Open Developer Conference, March 19th - 20th
- WPP invested in Integrated Media Measurement, a company that uses software on cell phones to measure TV and Radio consumption. SO much better than Arbitron’s Portable People Meter approach. Of course, neither solution does anything for user generated content as you’ll have to pay substantiable dollars to work with either of these companies.
- Journey (wow. remember Journey?) has found its new lead singer. On YouTube.
- Don’t stop believin’…
Our music is Democracy from Alexander Blu.
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25.Jan.08 
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