MySpace – a story about unused potential

When I was just reading a post by Michael Arrington on Techcrunch about the answers they received from MySpace employees (‘…since we all know that the ship is sinking…’) I truly felt sorry for this company and the people who work there.

Last year I was quite convinced that this company will make a smart move by focusing more on the content they can offer to the user – mostly artists. The acquistion of ilike.com with its great features in combination with the tons of content on their network could have been an amazing service and result in promising revenues (ticket sales etc.). Instead on focusing on this transition (since facebook won the social networks game) they started to battle internally. Lots of good people left the company and with them their knowledge and ideas. They joined new startups like Gravity where they could probably focus their time more on creating something rather than struggeling with a huge reorg (reorg always sounds like big corporation stuff).

The article on Techcrunch with the responses by MySpace employees shows clearly that this company is in a threat, everyone is more concerned about where to go and the ones who stay have to build up entire teams again. So instead of creating value out of their content (for the user and Murdoch) they scared some key employees away and with them some of the MySpace spirit left also.

Music business – A picture says more than a thousands words

Last week I have been at the web 2.o Expo in San Francisco. Everyday I was walking back to my hotel I came across the Apple Store. There is nothing special about this, but what I realized after I left the town was that across the street is a Virgin Megastore. And this Virgin Megastore is closing down very soon. This picture just demonstrates so perfectly the new age in music business with their new market leaders like Apple.

Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of both stores, but here is one from flickr.

Online music is a tricky business ;-)

I just read in an TC article again an article about a music site “Troubles At Imeem, But Company Says No Shutdown Imminent“. The statement which made me laugh was “Online music is a tricky business, where rabid users can actually quickly put you out of business simply by listening to too much music.”. Even Last.fm announced yesterday that they start to charge for their service (except in the US, UK and Germany), because they need to generate revenues and not only traffic. Well the cost for a stream are about $0.01 and if the streaming services can’t survive at this rate there might be only the chance to charge a fixed fee for its service like spotify or to force the users to pay attention to the advertisement.

In my opinion is (streaming) music only a way to sell other related products to the customers, but even this could be quite tough when they are listening too much music…