All of the new formats are moot. The format has been chosen. Nobody is going to download a new player, a new plugin, they have them already or they'll get MP3 players. The industry is screwed, no amount of watermark protection, no amount of promotion is going to help. Do any of you even listen to MP3's? That's why you're all still trying to figure this stuff out. You're not even in the mix of this critical juncture. New formats are moot! Copy protection won't work! Duhuh...? As soon as a copy protection scheme comes out it will be re-digitized and then MP3'ed if it's any good and put up on a pirate site.
It's like if Microsoft had come along in 1996 and said, "We've got something better than HTML, it's called MSTML." :) Years after the web had been already in place. That's the amount of content that is already MP3'ed. Literally thousands and thousands of files. I had a guy offer me last week at work the entire Pink Floyd catalog on one CD of MP3's. Unbelievable. This is unstoppable... People are just going to want more and more of this stuff. The other formats are moot!
The trick is, and I think MP3.COM has this figured out, providing enough variety to make people want to buy CD's and not just pirate them. People buy music they LOVE, not music they like. Make it easy to preview, easy to buy, make it easy to visit, and easy to remember where to go. Keep the prices, low and keep the new tunes coming.
It's a portal play... music portal play... I think the competition that MP3.COM will have will come from other MP3 portals. A label could put up a whole catalog in crappy (64K) MP3 compression and make quite a presence and not lose a dime, I'd bet...
Jeff Harrington
mp3.com |
