Week of March 31, 2008

Apple Now #1 Music Retailer In US

Friday, April 4, 2008

A leaded internal memo from Apple and posted by the Ars Technica website states that for the month of January Apple had passed Wal-Mart as the number one music retailer in the United States. Some speculation is that this is a temporary situation based on an increase in sales via iPods given away for Christmas, along with iTunes gift card sales, but this ignores the fact that Wal-Mart's music sales also increase dramatically around the Christmas holiday.

MySpace Music Closes Deal With Major Labels

Thursday, April 3, 2008

While the billion dollar copyright lawsuit against Google has received all the press, little attention has been paid to the lawsuits against MySpace from the major labels. Well, now we see why--the two sides were negotiating while navigating the legal storm. The result? MySpace Music parent News Corp. is investing $120 million into MySpace joint venture with the major labels (excluding EMI, which is still negotiating).

The venture will feature ad-supported free-to-stream on demand music, embeddable music players, and playlist support. Most surprisingly, free downloadable tracks will be supported, as well, via a yet-to-be-described ad-supported model.

In our New Media Landscape report we predicted that Yahoo! would make the move to a free ad-supported on demand music model, but here we find Myspace making the move in its place. As has been noted multiple places, the move toward free music distribution appears all but inevitable.

Browser Wars

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Gigaom.com has a great editorial about the state of the browser wars. What mattered in the past was the browser that rendered pages most accurately and quickly is not as important today as how browsers are able to power online applications. The underlying point: Browsers are commodities in looking at the web, but not in USING the web is something that will become more and more pronounced as we head into the future.

Friendfeed: Social Aggregation

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

We mentioned social aggregation in detail in our New Media Landscape report, and the social aggregator Friendfeed has been getting a lot attention lately, with its ability for users to pull together the random parts of their social graph into one spot, whether it's Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites and platforms. However, there has been a subtle undercurrent of discussion that is countering Friendfeed's success with the concept that the natural aggregator of someone's life should be THEIR site, not another hosted platform.

We see this as a vital and important conversation moving forward: Is the Internet moving toward a world where ultimate control of profiles, logins, and media feeds is in control of a single person on THEIR site or will this be aggregated by a company that individuals log into (like Friendfeed). It's too early to tell, but the history of the Internet tells us that as consumers get empowered, they take control on their own, which is not good news for Friendfeed.

Youtube Adds Statistics

Monday, March 31, 2008

For users who have been fortunate to see their video garner at least some level of popularity, one of the real downsides to Youtube is that you can't really get any kind of sense as to just how big your video is beyond pure "views." Youtube changed that on Friday with the release of user video statistics. You can now see a geographic breakdown of your video's usage and a comparison to the average video performance across the site.