Mike McGuire

For many months, nay years me and my ilk have wondered, “What will Google’s play be in online music?” License content and sell it through Google Checkout? Buy a small upstart music service?
Well, the answer is no and no. Really, all Google wants to do is just control the search results for music searches. [...]

[Read more →]

Well, this (from Billboard.com, subscription might be required) is nice news. Government regulators, online service providers and performance rights organizations coming together to “pledge” to try and resolve an important obstacle to greater consumer choice in online services: simplifying the process for legitimate online music sites to license content.
Imagine that,  a plan to make [...]

[Read more →]

With one minor turn of iPhone App Store policy dial, Apple is enabling all those developers who built “free” iPhone/iPod Touch applications to try and extract a fee for their work. For smaller publishers, or bands or independent labels or video producers, this would seem like a good thing, yes?
Can you say “fremium” app, media [...]

[Read more →]

With today’s introduction, MOG’s All Access service, at $5/month for full interactive-stream access (pick any song, any artist in the catalog and stream the songs without playback restrictions), establishes a new price point for subscription services. While the service won’t actually be available until sometime in November 2009, it will have more than five million [...]

[Read more →]

There are currently 100 million active credit cards on account with iTunes. And according to Apple, iTunes is the number one music retailer in the world. Not “number one in online downloads,” but number one. Of all channels.
That, my friends, is the most important news to come out of Apple Inc.’s 09/09/09 announcement, whether you’re [...]

[Read more →]

If the Cisco-Warner Music Group deal to have Warner use Cisco’s Eos platform for developing and hosting its artists websites is any indication of the future of the music labels, it’s about using websites as a way to establish and maintain market relevance, relevance that labels maintained by the control they used to wield by [...]

[Read more →]

You’ve probably seen the stories (like this one) about a rumored “new” format for packaging prerecorded online music into the new digital or interactive album.
If true, the promise of some new type of content bundle could be an interesting new opportunity for music labels to redefine their roles. Or they could totally screw up [...]

[Read more →]

Can the popularity of Rock Band franchise translate and extend the timeless — but let’s face it, musically archaic — Beatles catalog to a generation of folks who grew up disconnected from the album, AOR radio but have come of age in a time when music is effectively a public good? And speaking of “public [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Pandora and its ilk look to be getting some breathing room to try and negotiate more reasonable rates with rightsholders.
Good news all around, if you ask me.

[Read more →]