Mike McGuire

In addition to lowering prices on its family of flash-based Zune personal media players earlier this week, Zune and its subscriber service, has gone straight past value-proposition marketing to the “freemium” handout.
To-date, the Zune’s music service comprises an online  service where all the Zune-DRM’d music resides, PC software and proprietary hardware players. Kind of like [...]

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You might want to file this one under “Things That Should Have Happened Two Years Ago — but didn’t.”
News.com is reporting that Apple’s iTunes team is negotiating with Universal Music, Warner Music and SonyBMG to get them to follow EMI’s lead and drop their insistence on locking up songs using Apple’s FairPlay DRM technology.  [...]

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Maybe none of the old-guard protect-copyright-at-any-cost management  was looking when elements of MTV Networks inked this deal with MySpace and Auditude to monetize user-generated video.  I like to believe that what we saw with this deal (commentary from colleague Andrew Frank and me is here on the Gartner.com site) is that enlightened self-interest rules the [...]

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