Stress balls, breath mints, cupcakes and a sponsored “oxygen bar”: yes, it’s Internet Week in New York, the annual feast of branded freebies, parties and panels for the city’s digital media and marketing set.
Today a Yahoo presentation drew the biggest crowd at the warehouse-like SoHo venue. Some were clearly there for an address on “big data” by Billy Beane, the number-crunching general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and inspiration for Brad Pitt’s character in Moneyball.
The company that brought you AOL-Time Warner has become more careful about old media-new media investments. So it was little surprise that CNN, Time Warner’s cable news division, greeted a Reuters report that it was about to buy Mashable warily.
“We do not engage in speculation about our business and we aren’t commenting on those reports,” was the canned response.
As he celebrated Sony’s sweep of Grammy awards at a star-draped after-party in West Hollywood on February 12, Sir Howard Stringer looked like a man relieved.
Adele, the Sony-signed British singer, had won six trophies, capping a year of music successes for the Japanese group and its Welsh-American chief executive, who had lured industry veteran Doug Morris to run his record labels, and pulled off a bid for EMI Music Publishing without committing much capital.
It is a measure of how far streaming digital music services have come that Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, could be feted by a room full of music industry lawyers during Grammy Awards week.
Ek, the keynote speaker at the Entertainment Law Initiative event at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hinted at the industry’s initial resistance when he pointed out that he had started Spotify in 2006 and it had taken him two years to launch in Europe and a full five years before it hit the US market last July.
BookExpo America is upon us, and all the talk at the New York publishing fair is of booming e-book sales and where that leaves hardbacks and paperbacks.
Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain whose digital prospects helped encourage John Malone to make a $1bn offer last week, is marking the occasion by unveiling a new model of its Nook e-reader on Tuesday morning. Kobo got in a day early with the launch of a new touch-screen version of its 6-inch e-ink reader on Monday.
Few people outside the New York Times headquarters can have been happier to see the publisher announce its (very) long-awaited model for charging for online news last week than Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz.
The founder of The American Lawyer and the former head of WSJ.com set out two years ago to persuade publishers around the world that such paid models were feasible, and to provide them with the software to implement them.
When Beyond Oblivion broke cover last April even its founder, Adam Kidron, admitted that its plans for a digital music service that would make money from the 95 per cent of people who do not currently pay for downloads were “frightfully ambitious”. The service has yet to arrive – but at least Kidron now has some serious money to back his plans.
Digital music services like MOG, Rdio and Rhapsody have been vocal about their fear that Apple’s subscription policy will ruin innovative companies already shouldering start-up losses, and the industry’s concern was again on display at the FT Digital Media and Broadcasting conference on Wednesday.
Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI (chief lobbyist for the UK music industry) said he had been “shocked” by Apple’s plan to keep 30 per cent of all subscription sales through its App Store. That is more than the performer gets, and three or four times what the composer gets, he said: “It doesn’t seem fair at any level.”
Spotify has stayed silent about the impact of Apple’s new subscription plans, perhaps because it was too busy negotiating $100m in new funding, but MOG has now joined the list of digital media start-ups and venerable publishers expressing consternation and confusion.
“From a principle perspective, I have a problem,” says CEO David Hyman. “We’ve spent years building this, and invested millions. It’s not clear to me why they deserve a bigger piece of my business than I get. It doesn’t feel right at all.”
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