Yes, Google plans to launch a subscription music service this week , via its Google Play store. And yes, Google still plans to launch a separate subscription music service, later this year, via its YouTube site. Make sense? Of course not. It makes lots of sense for both YouTube and Play, which was built for Google’s Android devices, to sell music subscriptions. YouTube is the world’s biggest free music service, which could make it a fantastic funnel for a Spotify-like paid offering, which can also help solve some problems with the music labels . And if you’re going to have the world’s dominant mobile platform, then you ought to be the one selling music subscriptions that work on it, because that could help your customers stick to that platform. No sense in handing that feature over to Spotify, which works fine on iPhones and Kindles, too. And something that knitted Android and YouTube together — combing a mix of free, paid, mobile, audio and video — could be great. But that’s not what we’re going to see this week. Music folks I talked today expect the Google Play version to be paid only — no free teaser tier, like Spotify has — and without any features that will set it apart from rivals. And when YouTube launches its service — as best as I can tell, talks with big 3 labels are all but completed — that service will likely run parallel to, but not connected with, the Play version. Which means none of the free music people can get on YouTube will help sell Play subscriptions. This set-up supposedly stems from former Android boss Andy Rubin’s insistence on controlling his own fiefdom (“Andy and [YouTube head] Salar Kamangar couldn’t be in the same room together,” says a music executive who has worked with both of them.) But now we’re in the Sundar Pichai era , and he says he’s all about peace and love . I’ve heard people in and outside of Google suggest that at some point, down the line, the two services could knitted together, eventually. After all, just because something gets announced at Google I/O doesn’t mean it will show up . And getting something out there before it’s fully baked is standard operating procedure for Google. But music subscriptions are an old idea that still really haven’t caught on in a big way
Read MoreNBC on Sunday locked in the final piece of its late-night schedule, naming Seth Meyers the host of Late Night. The Saturday Night Live head writer and “Weekend Update” mainstay will succeed Jimmy Fallon, who in February 2014 takes over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno . Lorne Michaels will produce the new-look Late Night, as well as The Tonight Show. In its 31-year history, Late Night has been steered by three hosts: David Letterman
Read MoreIf he ever gets control of struggling computer maker Dell, billionaire investor Carl Icahn essentially said he plans to fire its founding CEO, Michael Dell. Taking to CNBC’s airwaves in another one of his candid phoned-in afternoon rants (the last was an epic 28-minute on-air slugfest with hedge fund investor Bill Ackman in January) with host Scott Wapner during the closing half hour or so of the network’s “Fast Money Halftime Report” show, Icahn revealed that on Monday he will nominate a slate of 12 new directors and, if successful, he’ll see to it that Michael Dell doesn’t remain CEO. “He will not be running the company,” Icahn said. “It’s not that I have anything against [Michael] Dell. I’m sure he’s a very nice guy,” Icahn said. “But it’s a new world out there.” Icahn has had a busy day on the Dell front. First he reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that his stake in Dell amounts to 4.52 percent. He also joined Southeastern Asset Management, Dell’s largest outside shareholder, in making a joint bid for the company . (The Wall Street Journal’s Moneybeat has the full text of the joint Icahn-Southeastern letter to Dell’s board here .) The special committee of Dell’s board has in the last several minutes issued a statement saying it is “carefully reviewing” the Icahn-Southeastern offer. “Mr. Icahn and Southeastern have outlined a potential leveraged recapitalization transaction that they want the Dell Board either to recommend at this time or to consider if the existing going-private transaction is rejected by Dell shareholders
Read MoreThere’s a reason social app Pheed has catered to the creative community in the six months since it launched. It’s an amalgam of sites like Instagram and video and audio sharing apps, where creatives can retain rights to their content and monetize it if they want. Think of it as an all-in-one delivery system for content creators. Pheed wants to take that a step further. On Thursday, the company launched an update to its iOS application that allows Pheed users to watch streaming, pay-per-view broadcasts from other Pheed users directly from their mobile devices. Pretty straightforward: A user wants to do a live broadcast of some material. Say they’ve got a song to perform, or a discussion to hold, what have you. They set up the event and decide what they want to charge — if anything — for other Pheed users to view the live broadcast. The in-app payment system accepts the cost of admission and sends it to the user’s bank account, and viewers are sent a reminder before the broadcast goes live. Smart. It’s obviously something that could appeal to the masses of musicians and artists out there who are promoting themselves via social and apps — think of the Lady Gagas, the Snoop Doggs and others who are creating their own mobile apps to promote their albums and content — while also giving random small-timers the ability to promote their material as well. After all, it may be easy for Snoop to get his spliff-happy app downloaded thousands of times to push his new album, but the starving artist in L.A. may have a tougher time. Live performance could be a novel way to garner an audience. (I think of early YouTube stars who came from being nobodies to hosting their own TV shows.) Unlike some other more high-profile social video apps, Pheed is bootstrapped, fairly small and doesn’t bankroll stars to join the service. “We’ve never paid anyone to join, we never gave out equity, and we’re not that rich,” Pheed co-founder OD Kobo said in an interview
Read MoreIn yesterday’s world, we went about our offline lives and selected pictures of moments we wanted to share that projected how we wanted other people to perceive us — the pretty sunsets, the contorted angles to make us look skinny, the smiling family posed for a group portrait. In tomorrow’s world, we’ll already be living online all the time, so the notion of “sharing” may change. And you can already see that future on Snapchat , the mobile app where millions of young people send disappearing images, taken in the moment and then deleted within 10 seconds of being viewed. “We think it captures a broader use case,” said Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel, contrasting Snapchat with Facebook and Instagram in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile . “It’s less about ‘I’m cool, I look really good,’ and it’s a lot more about communicating where you are, what you’re doing, how you feel. It’s more about chatting and messaging than putting yourself on display.” Wait, what? Is he arguing that this weird niche-y notion of impermanent photos is actually a bigger opportunity than regular photos? He is. Broadly speaking: Communicating with photos is potentially a bigger market than scrapbooking. Spiegel pointed to daily upload numbers that show that Snapchat is already bigger than Instagram, at least by one metric: Users upload 150 million Snaps per day , versus 40 million daily photos on Instagram. Said Spiegel, “I think there’s definitely a place for permanence; we’re not anti-permanence by any means. We just believe ephemeral should be the default.” Here’s the full video of the interview with Spiegel, in which he also discusses norms for teenagers in social media, potential Snapchat business models (a.k.a. ads) and the virtues of running a startup from Los Angeles: [ See post to watch video ]
Read MoreiPad image copyright Skylines My career in digital media started at a pivotal moment. The year was 2001, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had just upheld an order for Napster to begin identifying and removing copyrighted songs from its music file sharing service. I was hired by a young startup that had recently changed its name from CDDB to Gracenote to help Napster use music recognition technology to comb through millions of tracks to find copyrighted works from the labels that it had to remove. Napster was the first of its kind, providing music fans with easy and free access to albums and tracks and giving them a reason to avoid buying expensive CDs — the lifeblood of the music industry’s business. The ability to share files around the globe reduced the barriers to music discovery and allowed Napster users to find new artists and songs in ways never imagined. It was a truly disruptive service, and it scared the hell out of the music industry. Instead of embracing the massive adoption of this new service, finding a solution to accommodate the changing landscape or harnessing Napster as a future platform, the music industry held onto its rigid CD-based business, prayed that file sharing would go away and eventually tore Napster down. Today, you can draw several parallels between the music industry in the late ’90s and early 2000s and the TV industry today. Viewing habits are changing. Just like music in the early 2000s when young adults started turning away from physical media and opting for singles versus complete albums, viewers are “tuning in” very differently to movies and TV programming. Today, if Netflix were part of a cable package, it would be one of the top viewed networks, according to a Facebook post from CEO Reed Hastings . Meanwhile, Nielsen recently reported that cable cutting is up by 150 percent since 2007 , marking a significant shift in viewer behavior. Additionally, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia is now assuming the role of Shawn Fanning by intimidating the cable companies with a disruptive service that lets viewers access broadcast programs at a much lower cost than cable packages. But, instead of adapting to changing viewer behavior, the cable companies, Hollywood and broadcasters are holding onto old business models for dear life and calling the lawyers. Sound familiar? Avoiding a Bad Sequel: Lessons for the TV Industry Ignoring or fighting digital consumer behavior is a recipe for disaster — resulting in rejection faster than an unpalatable creation by a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen. It’s time for TV broadcasters, content creators and advertisers to innovate their businesses instead of maintaining existing models through threats and litigation. First, they need to understand that their viewers are setting the rules and defining the life expectancy of their programming and services.
Read MoreDreamWorks Animation’s decision to buy YouTube teen and tween network AwesomenessTV sheds some light on what it means when a talent agency “incubates” a startup. That term is becoming more common at Hollywood’s major tenpercentaries as they invest their time and money into new ventures to make up for lost revenue from more traditional film... Read more
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