Samsung joins download crowd
p2pnet.net News:- Shades of yesteryear when everyone from Living Bra and up was scrambling to launch an instant-win (they thought) music download site. They flopped. But now a new batch of hopefuls is at it again, bolstered by phony Big Music mega-hype and the unreal idea that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is for real.
This time Samsung has joined the madding crowd with plans to, “introduce its own online music service to compete against Apple Computer Inc.’s market-leading iTunes-iPod franchise and Microsoft Corp.’s upcoming Zune music products,” says the Associated Press.
Since when was iTunes a franchise? It’s the online iPod front-end, paid for and supported by iPod owners.
Anyway, “The South Korean-based electronics giant said Friday it will work with media provider MusicNet to launch a music subscription and download service later this year in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France,” says the story.
“Samsung said it plans to later expand the service throughout Europe and Asia. Samsung said the online music service will be compatible with its upcoming line of portable MP3 and media players, but did not disclose further details about the service, pricing or fees.”
The How Much? question is, however, a no brainer.
The corporate download market is an ongoing non-event because its suppliers, the Big Four Organized Music family, are still demanding between 60 and 85 cents wholesale for each file, which means clients such as Apple are forced to charge $1 and up.
Apple doesn’t care. Its iTunes ’service’ started as a loss-leader for iPod and the likes of Napster have yet to make any impression at all on the vast majority of online music lovers, who continue to ignore the corporate ’services,’ looking instead to the p2p networks with their huge (and often free) ‘catalogues’ of independent and corporate downloads, and the growing numbers of sites posted by pro and amateur musicians.
When it first became evident that Warner Music, EMI, Sony BMG and Vivendi Universal, as they are now, had totally missed the mp3/download boat, they tried to kick-start a replacement sales and distribution vehicle and for a while, concerns such as Wal-Mart and other major firms were sucked in.
That didn’t last, though, and now the hype has started all over again, with the forced closure and then absorption of what might have been competitors, such as BearShare and iMesh, in the background.
People would willingly pay a fair price for their music fixes, but $1 isn’t fair and most people aren’t dumb enough to go for it.
The entertainment cartels own, or directly or indirectly control, the lion’s share of mainstream print and electronic media outlets and they’re using them to build the completely false concept that there there’s a viable Music Download Golden Goose, and that $1 a download is the accepted and acceptable going rate.
One day, there will be a fully fledged corporate market, but that day hasn’t yet arrived and nor will it while the Big Four continue to bamboozle their corporate clients with grossly excessive wholesale rates, and to try to sue their own customers into becoming good little consumers.
Meanwhile, the likes of Samsung, with their own portable players, are trying to do an Apple, launching sites they hope and pray future customers will buy from to justify the existence of their many and various portable players.
“Apple has shown that to do this, you have to control as many of the parts of the chain as possible,” AP has analyst Mike McGuire saying.
He got that right.
Also See:
Associated Press – Samsung to launch online music service, September 1, 2006
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September 7th, 2006 at 3:02 am
I understand NOW the whole p2p thingy!
We are no Pirates, we are doing a franchise business! (like Mc. Donalds)
But different then those “independent” restaurant owners that in the end give away a product that is always the same low quality, we “apple franchisers” introduced a better product without Digital Restrictions Malware (DRM)
Pirates are the Burger King of the onlinemusicmarket I guess
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Alter_Fritz