DISQUS

magnusdopus · 1 year ago

In the world of music subscription, Rhapsody defeated Yahoo, Microsoft, and MTV. They will easily beat any others. It's not a high margin business and Rhapsody already has a majority of the best customers. Apple is a whole other matter.
Adam Ostrow · 1 year ago

well, it would be a fairly high margin business for the record labels no? Eliminating the middle-men like Rhapsody, iTunes, etc.
magnusdopus · 1 year ago

Not necessarily. About half the costs are for user acquisition/marketing. Those don't go away. Sony will need to build the DRM, unless they want to buy Microsofts. You still have to pay the artists. And have you seen Real's numbers? They aren't that great.
robertgordon · 1 year ago

They could've already had a subscription service if they hadn't got cold feet - This is the same BMG that invested in Napster and then ran away from the deal when they had a chance to buy them. It still never protected them from making big settlement payouts to other labels, they should've stuck it out and they would've probably had something to show for it.