Big deal.
The Macalope is in general agreement with Jupiter Research's David Card that today's announcement of hot four-way action between MySpace, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner could be huge. The reason, of course, is because the kids love the MySpace. There are also a lot of details missing and there's plenty of room for them to screw this up, as is frequently their wont.
But the horny one had to chuckle at the press release on Warner's web site:
"MySpace Music" Empowers Artists and Consumers Globally With Unprecedented Digital Music Service and E-Commerce Platform
New Company to Leverage 30 Million Unique MySpace Music Traffic to Activate Monetization Around Music Content
Boy, they really know how to talk to their customers, don't they? The Macalope doesn't know about MySpace users, but when he hears that there's a new service that "empowers" "content" "monetization" through "e-commerce", he just wants to rush right out and cut himself off a slice of that!
The Macalope realizes press releases are not really directed at customers, but they do get put into news reports that customers read. You'd never see a press release from Apple like that. Maybe that's one of the reasons why Apple's the number one music retailer in the U.S.
Mythical beast and rumormonger extraordinaire, the Macalope writes about all things Apple for the CNET Blog Network. Read more at The Macalope: An Apple blog. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Here's a little thing, too. If you roll your pointer over the iTunes mini player, the scroll wheel adjusts the volume on the player. You don't have to click it, just roll it over. Tiny, meaningless detail? Insignificant feature? Yup. Pile enough of those up and you get the difference between OS X and Windows.
I don't believe I've ever read the term "monetization" in an Apple PR.
I like KoolAidŽ.
http://thethoughtfulblogger.blogspot.com/2008/04/in-year-2021.html
The kids USED to love the MySpace. But now that's it's used almost entirely as a marketing tool, a lot of kids are jumping ship and fast. It'll be awhile before it has any real impact on the numbers, but the decline has definitely begun.