April 30, 2010

The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st.

In appreciation of your support over the last five years, you will receive a credit in the amount of your Lala web song purchases for use on Apple's iTunes Store. If you purchased and downloaded mp3 songs from Lala, those songs will continue to play as part of your local music library.

Remaining wallet balances and unredeemed gift cards will be converted to iTunes Store credit (or can be refunded upon request). Gift cards can be redeemed on Lala until May 31st.

Labels: Apple, Lala.com

April 28, 2010

April 26, 2010

"The corporate model has collapsed, but small-label bands playing to 200 people a night can pay the bills and raise a family on it. That's why we’ll have better and more interesting innovations."

For Apple, it's a Wintel-like cycle in which new Apple hardware drives the creation and purchase of new apps. Except it's better than Wintel; the combination of Intel processor running Microsoft's Windows operating system never really managed to leap from PCs to other devices. Apple has constructed its empire so that almost anything you buy on iTunes -- and Apple has your credit-card information with your first purchase -- can run on any future iProduct. "The laws of nature say that [Apple is] making too much damn money, that this has to be unsustainable," says David J. Eiswert, who runs T. Rowe Price's (TROW) $312 million Global Technology Fund (PRGTX). "But who is going to stop them?"

April 21, 2010

April 19, 2010

It could be that the pay-per-track model discourages risk-taking and exploration of new music, which is not an issue with Rhapsody, which uses an all-you-can-eat subscription model.

April 16, 2010

April 12, 2010

What Apple is doing, is that they are building a dominant mobile platform. Basically, they're recreating Windows in the mobile space with the iPhone.

There's a reason people are turning their iPod volume too high. People are responding to several generations of mounting infrastructure noise. We are so loud in part because we have to create our own personal noise so that we don't feel like we're being held hostage to the grind and clash of the environment. I went to Florida, where these people were using their cars to blast super-loud music. But the places where these people live is horrifically noisy. When you're dealing with that kind of environment, I can really see the temptation to blast something that at least you like.

April 09, 2010

- In the case of Amazon and iTunes single-track downloads, 1,813 units must be sold monthly; 21,750 units a year.

- For CD Baby full album downloads (under the new commission rates), the numbers are: 155 units a month; 1,859 units a year.

- For eMusic single-track downloads, at the rates reported for Q3 2009: 3,392 downloads a month; 40,941 a year.

- With Rhapsody streams, you’ll need 127,473 streams a month; 1,529,670 a year (yep, that’s over one-and-a-half million).

- Finally, Last.fm rates mean you’ll need 7,733,333 plays monthly; 92,800,000 plays a year.

I've always liked Ticketmaster's ticketing business; I figured that any business that could frustrate its customers but still keep them coming back is a business with a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the merger with Live Nation greatly diluted the attractiveness of the overall company.

First, to get the merger past the antitrust hurdles, the company had to agree to license its ticketing software, providing a potential bridge across the moat of the ticketing business. Yet even if the ticketing business retains its moat (something with decent odds of happening, in my view), Live Nation's other operations are quite unattractive. It owns several concert venues, a business with a high degree of rivalry and modest barriers to entry. (This is almost the polar opposite of International Speedway ISCA, which essentially has mini-monopolies in any given city.) Live Nation is also involved in promoting concerts and managing artists, businesses for which I fail to see a moat. The old Live Nation generated an operating loss in four of the past six years, and the combined entity will also have to deal with roughly $1.5 billion in debt.

In sum, Live Nation is a financially levered firm with a declining moat and a management team that have done a good job destroying value. No thank you!

April 08, 2010

April 01, 2010