The recording industry is yet again offering a downloadable music service consumers can’t use – no MP3s, songs not transferable to portable music players and downloads that are no longer playable if the user’s subscription lapses.
Analysts consider the products of Musicnet (BMG/EMI/Warner) and Pressplay (Sony/Universal) unmarketable – the companies having failed to meet consumer expectations due to excessive paranoia and prices.
See also analysis from InternetNews and especially from MP3 Newswire. “Let’s just say that governments have bigger worries than chasing Napster clones right now.”
The point of this exercise in futility, from Velvet Rope poster ‘Thousandaire’:
“I worked for one of the majors, and it was a supposedly “tech savvy” label (that’s all I will say publicly about where I worked). Nobody in their new media division believed that the download programs would work, they viewed it as “we want to show that there is a dollar value on a download to establish damages.” The attempts to build systems can be viewed as a way to prove damages when suing other download services. (i.e. “you have 50,000,000 members, and that is cheating us out of $500,000,000 a month that they would otherwise be paying if you weren’t around). Heck, the labels made a business model out of suing the likes of MP3.com out of existence.”
That sounds alarmingly plausible. “These MP3s had a street value of one million billion zillion dollars …”
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