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Monday, 14 February 2005 |
Buyers said to favour a la carte music in 05
Register - London,England,UK
Napster and co. will have to work much harder if they're to convince music
buyers that subscription services are worth the money.
That's the conclusion of research conducted by market watcher Parks Associates.
Its Global Digital Living survey reveals that only eight per cent of people who
own MP3 players and possess an Internet connection are likely to use a music
subscription service this year.
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By contrast, around 40 per cent said they are likely to buy songs on a one-off
basis.
"Consumers either do not fully grasp the value of a subscription
'all-you-can-eat' service, or they simply don't want it," said Parks research
director John Barrett.
There can be a financial benefit to the subscription services, if you download
enough content, but the fundamental barrier appears the rental element - users
don't own the music they download. Stop paying Napster, Virgin or whoever, and
your downloads immediately become unplayable.Write Comment (0 Comments) |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 27 February 2005 )
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Monday, 14 February 2005 |
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Business Podcasting Is Taking Off
WebProNews - Lexington,KY,USA
It's been interesting reading some of the reactions by business bloggers to
General Motors' first experiment with podcasting last week.
This Technorati list has lots of blog commentaries, mostly positive, although
most don't discuss the podcasts from the specific communication point of view.
Quick recap: GM produced two MP3 files that they mentioned in a post last
Thursday relating to new-model car launches at the Chicago Auto Show. Both files
were made available via an RSS feed from the GM Fastlane Blog. And both audio
files were the sound portion of audio-visual webcasts, ie, not audio shows
produced specifically for podcasting.
Among the bloggers whose posts I read, I saw that Christopher Carfi gives it a
big thumbs down. My colleague (and fellow podcaster) Shel Holtz says the podcast
is a bust. In contrast, Steve Rubel sees it as more innovation from GM. Jon
Froda likes the fact that GM experiments. That's how I see it, too - while it
does remain to be seen how successful this will be (it was only last week!), GM
has taken a great step forward with this experiment in trying out the medium.
Write Comment (0 Comments) |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 27 February 2005 )
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Monday, 14 February 2005 |
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Copyright laws under review
Sydney Morning Herald (subscription) - New
South Wales,Australia
For years millions of Australians have been routinely programming their VCRs to
record a program or copying a CD on to their MP3 player.
Soon it could be legal.
The federal Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, is considering allowing consumers
to freely copy films, music and photographs from one medium to another, as long
as they have paid for them and the material is solely for private use.
The prospect of a "fair use" clause moved a step closer yesterday when the
Federal Government announced a wide-ranging review of copyright laws.
"There's a reasonable argument for putting forward the opinion that when someone
has bought something in one format and has acquired the copyright for it in that
particular format then there is a fair use for them to take it to another
format. I think it's a strong argument," Mr Ruddock told the Herald. Write Comment (0 Comments) |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 23 February 2005 )
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Monday, 14 February 2005 |
Xdrive's Virtual iPod an idea before its time
San Jose Mercury News (subscription) - USA
It's not often that we sing the praises of products that are glitchy, have major
limitations and require special software to run.
Those are all problems that Xdrive -- www.xdrive.com -- is facing with its new
Virtual iPod service, which promises to deliver the iPod experience without the
need for a $250 to $500 MP3 player.
That was enough to catch our attention. And even though the initial Virtual iPod
service seemed to be more trouble than it was worth, the promise of what it
likely will be able to deliver in the not-so-distant future makes it worth the
effort.
You might remember Xdrive, one of the companies in the early days of the
Internet that pitched paid Web-based storage for backing up files. The company
recently added a free music feature -- basically a folder where users can store
their MP3 music files for access from any Web connection. Subscribers to the
Xdrive service pay $9.95 a month for the initial 5 gigabytes of storage.
Here's the trick to the Virtual iPod service: Using those MP3 files, create a
custom playlist in the standard .m3uformat and transfer that playlist file to
your phone. When you launch that playlist from your Web-enabled phone, the songs
stream from your Xdrive folder to your phone. Plug a headset into your phone and
-- voilà! -- you've got gigabytes of music at your fingertips, just like you
would with an iPod.Write Comment (0 Comments) |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 27 February 2005 )
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