p2pnet.net News:- It seems today is the day Apple turns iTunes loose on Europe. It’s also reportedly the day Napster II announces a partnership with UK cable group NTL under which it’ll offer music subscriptions to NTL’s broadband customers.

Certainly, there’s no way Napster II’s owner, Roxio, will make the remains of Fanning’s brain-child work without heavyweight help. And even then its chances of success are akin to a given individual being nailed by Big Music for sharing files online. That’s 61 million to one.

“With more than half a million songs available at the click of a mouse, a music revolution will launch across Europe this week,” says a MacNewsWorld story here.

Music revolution? It’s already happened with p2p. This is just the Big Five recording labels trying desperately to catch up. All the fuss, generated wholly by the music industry, is part of the deal. The labels are praying their PR, reproduced faithfully as copy by the mainstream media as if the music industry was a credible source, will be believed by the public and potential partners alike to the extent they’ll actually buy into the services.

The ‘half a million songs’ are the same ones Big Music has been trying unsucccesfully to unload online for the past several years.

Staying away in droves
The corporate music business is in the same position as a corporate farmer with a huge investment in potatoes no one wants. So it misrepresents the potential to gullible business people, many of whom have absolutely no interest on the grocery trade, and persuades them to sell the potatoes at the same prices, telling them this way, they’ll gain exposure in a Hot New area.

But that’s just hard-sell. The reality is: the only winner is the farmer. He’s collecting from all the stores and no matter if one sells one potato while another sells 75 million, it’s all money in the farmer’s pocket.

In the meanwhile, the customers the labels were counting on to flock to the online music stores it supports and supplies are staying away in their millions.

Only Apple’s iTunes is doing anything, and even it is the leader of a pack which can only stumble along, which is OK from Apple’s viewpoint because it’s selling iPods, not music, and what’s online seems to be enough to keep iPod buyers happy.

But iPod is by no means all there is and the other sites combined aren’t even making a dent. At least one billion files are shared online every month and as the days go by, more and more people are realising the Net is packed with genuinely interesting, truly innovative sites offering independent music from independent musians working with (not for) independent labels. And they’re selling their songs at prices the public can afford.

Speaking of Apple’s UK opening and Napster II’s deal, “The two initiatives follow agreement with music publishers over complex distribution rights in Europe,” says the Financial Times here, going on:

“Apple, whose iTunes store and iPod digital music player have all but defined the US internet music market, has scheduled a press conference in London tomorrow, claiming ‘the biggest story in music is about to get bigger’.”

Brad Duea, president of Napster, is quoted as saying: “This is a significant deal for Napster because we are partnering with the biggest provider of broadband services in the UK, and NTL’s own research has shown that over 75 per cent of broadband customers download music each month.”

What Duea doesn’t saysis that 99.9% of downloaders aren’t downloading big music product and wouldn’t go near a Big Five supplied site if you paid them. The various attempts to revive Napster have all failed, and Roxio’s will be no different.

Apple, however, is on the way because it’s reaching a different audience. It’ll compete successfully with OD2, the European incumbents, and, “Apple is hoping to build on the phenomenal success of its music store in the US, where it has sold more than 70m songs over the internet since launching in April 2003,” says The Times.

Seventy million in more than a year versus one billion every month?

It doesn’t matter, though, because while the labels fume and fumble, freelance developers are coming up with ever more clever and efficient ways to share online to everyone’s advantage – not just the Big Five’s.

A critical mass is close to being reached.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2004 at 12:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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