The news that Sony, when and if they get their own streaming music site off the ground and start generating income, may pull out of iTunes, seems like such a no-brainer that it almost serves as a textbook case of how behind the major labels are. They’ve had the ability to stream and sell through their own sites for at least five years, if not more, and they’re only really getting around to doing it now, after a couple of dozen other companies have got the drop on them? The iTunes model is a good one, but it shouldn’t be the only one, and as long as the labels are out there scooping up new artists, with the full knowledge that once those artists are established they’ll probabaly start selling directly to their audiences themselves, it only makes sense for them to put a little more effort into controlling digitial distribution. It’s not as if there haven’t been plenty of examples for them to follow and build on. I have only two questions. First, how long before someone puts together a site that does nothing more than aggregrate the growing number of streams that will be necessary to access new music? Second, is Sony going to put their streaming service on their existing corporate site? I ony ask because every time I go there my browser freezes and I have to restart it.
Posts Tagged ‘Sony’
Well, duh
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011Thank you, Masaru Ibuka
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010Tim Quirk’s wonderful EMP presentation on personal listening devices from the Walkman to the present (Masaru Ibuka was the Sony exec who started the ball rolling) is now available on the Rhapsody blog. It’s somewhat self-serving, personal listening being Rhapsody’s bread and butter, after all, but Quirk is too honest, and too cynical, to do nothing but toot his company’s horn. The clincher for me is the graph showing how broad many people’s personal listening habits are, and how little service they get from radio, or even a lot of the streaming recommendation services (including Rhapsody). If someone could come up with an algorithm to fill that niche, they’d take over radio and the internet in a matter of months. My instinct tells me, though, that not only is such a a thing not possible, but it’s better for all of us that it isn’t.
