| Tuesday, December 13, 2005 |
02:05 - DOOM doom doom DOOM doom DOOOM
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_51/b3964063.htm?chan=tc
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Wow! Average weekly rates of legal music downloads fell by 0.44% in November—and BusinessWeek says it means Apple is "holding back the music biz" and "hurting song sales".
The bad guy? "The villain in the story is the iPod".
The source? The CEO of Napster.
Nice reporting, guys. Real nice. Wall-to-wall iPod buyers in malls and iTunes gift card sales "off the charts", but Apple is "hurting the music biz" and Chris Gorog is the next prophet, joining the ranks of visionary and level-headed CEOs like Creative's and Motorola's. Yuh-huh. But, hey! It's the tech press. And if there's any law of tech punditry, it's that if you make a prediction and you're wrong, nobody ever remembers—you were just presenting creative speculation and thinking outside the box. But if you make a prediction and by dumb luck you happen to be right, they'll hail you as a visionary. So just say everything about everything—there's no downside!
Except judging by the reader comments (there seemed to be more of them earlier in the day) and their overwhelming disdain for the non-reporting in this article, there may start to be a downside for publishing dumb articles like this after all, as journals efficiently trash their own reputations in front of viewers' disinterested eyes. For that matter, so many of the commenters (reacting to Gorog's peevish sniping that Napster music can't play on the iPod) seemed to believe that stores like Napster and Yahoo sell MP3s (rather than DRM'd WMAs) that the inevitable conclusion is that nobody's using rental-style stores. Otherwise they'd know stuff like that.
Ah well—they'll surely know soon, because Microsoft is about to launch its own music store, in partnership with MTV. And as everybody knows, MTV is the respected source when it comes to music, right? That'll undoubtedly be what rockets Microsoft's music-download business to preeminence even though its MSN-based one has been around and spectacularly failing to gain any market share for months now. Integration with WMP (presumably in an iTunes-like sort of interface) will be one benefit that other music stores haven't been able to boast (it's a genuine consumer value to have your music store, your music organizer, and your music player all made by the same company and operating as a seamless unit), but it still won't work with the iPod. And oh, is it going to rankle Microsoft that such a thing will stand in their way...
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Brian Tiemann
