The internet industry scored a tactical victory this week with Wednesday’s blackout of sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit, and the White House’s decision to oppose parts of two bills intended to curb the file-sharing of films and copyrighted material. “Piracy rules,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch angrily.
EMI’s recorded music business proves to be alive
The Cinderella story of the unexpectedly successful Citigroup auction of EMI – with the business being sold in two halves to Vivendi’s Universal and Sony – is the recorded music division.
The FT reports that Universal is paying about $1.9bn – more than the $1.7bn-$1.8bn that Citigroup, which took over the business from Guy Hands’ Terra Firma, initially hoped to get. That appears to signal some life in recorded music, after all.
The conventional wisdom of recent years has been that, while the music publishing companies that hold the back catalogue rights for well-known music, still had some value, recorded music values were slipping due to mass piracy and the digital revolution.
Spider-Man at last opened on Tuesday night on Broadway, having already been playing to audiences for six months of “previews” that produced disastrously bad notices, injuries to five actors who fell off the set or crashed from the hanging wires, and the eventual firing of Julie Taymor, its original director.
Sony needs a bit of Ohga and Karajan’s magic
Sony’s launch of its first tablet devices is bound to excite unflattering comparisons with revolutionary Sony products of the past – particularly because it falls in the same week as the death of Norio Ohga, the Japanese company’s former chairman and chief executive.
As every retrospective of Ohga’s extraordinary life has pointed out, he was the Sony executive who helped establish and drive the compact disc. By contrast, Sony’s “S1″ and “S2″ (their temporary names, thank goodness), already seem doomed to be mere “iPad rivals”.
Maestros, mitts and the best laid plans
I wrote a piece in the Weekend FT on the vagaries of concert halls and baseball stadiums:
If you build it, they will come. But they will not know what to expect.
New York Yankee fans are scratching their heads over the eccentric behaviour of their new $1.5bn baseball stadium in the Bronx. So far, it has proved very friendly to batters, giving up 20 home runs in the first four games.
Theories vary as to why the new stadium should be acting differently to the old one. It is built on an adjacent site and is supposed to be the same size. Yet batters have been regularly lofting balls out of the park and into the crowds, especially over right centre-field. Yankees fans talk of a “jet stream” effect carrying fly balls from high in the air into the stands.
The Yankees confront the same challenge as cricket teams and concert orchestras breaking in their new home turfs. No matter how carefully designed, each pitch, stadium and concert hall has a character.
Even the best laid plans of architects, engineers and specialists in acoustics can go awry. In the case of concert halls, they often do.
The rest is here.
The Taylor Swift index of Apple’s power
The subject of the pricing of Taylor Swift’s new album as a digital download on Amazon and iTunes continues to intrigue me.
As Felix Salmon notes, the reason for the initial low price of $3.99 on Amazon, versus the $11.99 you have to pay on iTunes, was probably more a matter of Amazon doing some loss-leading to lure people away from its rival than a tribute to the music industry, as I suggested.
The album has now gone up to $8.99 on Amazon, while the price on iTunes remains the same. The strange thing is that, not only is the product more or less the same on Amazon (and arguably superior since all the music downloads on Amazon come in MP3 format with no digital rights restrictions), but it can be set to place all music in one’s iTunes library.
Despite all of this, most people are still paying a higher price for an inferior product on iTunes because of inertia, ignorance or innate loyalty to Apple.
In fact, anecdotally, many people I talk to do not realise that they can download music just as easily from Amazon as from iTunes. It demonstrates the power of distribution and brand, even in a seamless digital environment where Amazon is a click away from iTunes.
I imagine that Amazon will have to do quite a bit more price discounting to persuade sufficient numbers of people to switch loyalties. So I look forward to buying more cheap music there in future.
A very cheap album by Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift’s second album Fearless, favourably written-up by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker among others, came out today. It is already top of the chart of MP3 downloads on Amazon.com.
It is also selling for $3.99. Yes, $3.99, which is less than some Starbucks drinks for a 13-song collection. So why would you not buy it, if you are even mildly interested?
It strikes me that the music industry is coming to terms with the online world.
The music labels can take a punch
My FT column this week is on Amy Winehouse. Well, not exactly. It is more about the music labels and whether they can survive. I conclude that they probably can, but it does not matter too much anyway. You can read it here and comment below.
| About this blog | Blog guide |
John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT.
He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of All That Glitters, an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
John Gapper on Twitter
Follow John Gapper's tweets
johngapper: @MatthewGwyther feels that way
johngapper: Bit odd for Peter Preston to argue in The Observer (prop: @arusbridger) that the FT should slow its digital transition http://t.co/kdu8YNig
johngapper: @blueskysinking Actually, there's a Tennessee Fried Chicken, a brand with which I am unfamiliar
Older entries
