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noreply@blogger.com (simon h b) 13 hours ago
Increasingly, Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace looks like a kneejerk move that confused the panic with the strategic. Clearly, he's managed to bring this management style to MySpace, whose purchase of MySpace looks exactly the same. As takeovers go, it has all the thought and care of that box of Milk Tray y Way grabbed from a Wild Bean Cafe shelf moments before midnight on Valentine's Day. Admittedly, MySpace are getting something dirt cheap - the most generous estimates are putting the price tag at nine million; shrewder heads suggest it might have been scooped up for a million dollars. The company has spent more than twenty million to get to this point. On the other hand, MySpace is already seeing its bottom line assailed by the costs of offering streaming music - does it really need to pick up more of those costs? Especially since Imeem was undermined by high royalty demands from labels - exactly the same problem MySpace is struggling with.
noreply@blogger.com (simon h b) 15 hours ago
"You would think they would have something better to do" observes Dave Bronze, bassist with the band that used to be called Wells Fargo until the bank of the same name got in touch. Yes, apparently, Wells Fargo thought there might be people getting confused by a swing band playing in East Anglia and a US bank. There's the usual old cant from Wells Fargo about "protecting the brand" - although it's perhaps a bit insulting to the customers of the bank to suggest that they're so dense that, if by some chance they found themselves outside a pub on the Colchester bypass on a Saturday night promising "Wells Fargo tonight", they'd be rushing inside to sort out their direct debits. Wells Fargo are now simply Fargo. Let's hope the ID card company of the same name doesn't find out.
noreply@blogger.com (simon h b) 15 hours ago
Record labels will feel vindicated by Business Insider's chart showing whose videos are the biggest earners on YouTube. Universal, Sony, Hollywood Records, EMI... Yes, surely, this is proof that without music, YouTube would be making nothing. On the other hand: even aggregated, the top ten earning video sources struggle to account for more than about 10% of the monetised views. Lots of source, making little bits and pieces, adding up to the whole - sure, Google would miss Universal if they weren't there. But not much.
noreply@blogger.com (simon h b) 15 hours ago
Universal music are currently doing a spot of market research, aimed primarily at seeing what Spotify is doing to the music market. It's being run by an outfit called Angus Reid Strategies through a service called Springboard UK, and the idea behind it makes sense. Disruptive technologies being disruptive, why wouldn't you want to try and work out what they're going to do to you? One problem, though: when the survey gets onto torrents, it starts to sound less like a disinterested investigation, and more like it's - and let's be generous here - trying to educate. Hence the torrent systems themselves as described, more than once, as "non-legal" services. Apart from being wrong - and deliberately confusing the networks with the data on the networks - if you make the question sound so hostile, isn't it going to skew the responses you get? "Did you touch that naughty thing?" is much less likely to get an honest answer than "do you use that thing?", ...
noreply@blogger.com (simon h b) 16 hours ago
Dean Piper, writing in today's Sunday Mirror, seems to grasp that Amy Winehouse's newfound embrace of the scalpel is an extension of her previous love of the pipe: Once an addict, always an addict. And now it seems Amy Winehouse is battling a new addiction – plastic surgery. So, does Piper approach the story delicately, or like a set of new punchlines in waiting? I can reveal that just weeks after she pumped up her boobies from a 32B to a 32D she’s booking herself to go back under the knife – this time to sort out her beak. Ha ha ha; she's addicted. Is it a good idea for a singer with a distinctive voice to have her nose hacked about?
