Thursday, February 17, 2011
Don’t look now, but
Sony has launched its own music subscription service, offering unlimited music for $10 a month. Interestingly, the new service won't work with portable devices. In explanation,
Sony Network Entertainment’s
Tim Schaaf told All Things D’s Peter Kafka, “We felt the home space was underserved.” Okaaaaaayyyyy… At the
New Music Seminar (
see story),
Tom Silverman stated that CDs accounted for close to three-quarters of U.S. music sales last year. Indeed, the shiny round things account for 93% of the Latin market, 85% of gospel and 84% of country. "CDs aren't doing so bad," Silverman said during opening remarks at the conference in L.A. "People still like CDs."… During last night’s finale of the three-day
Jeopardy! Competition pitting past big winners
Ken Jennings and
Brad Rutter against
Watson, the
IBM-engineered supercomputer came out on top. Watson finished with $77,147, Jennings came in second with $24,000 and Rutter pulled up the rear with $21,600. The win is not unprecedented for IBM, which built
Deep Blue, the chess-playing supercomputer that beat champ
Garry Kasparov. Wrote Jennings on his veo screen, quoting from
The Simpsons,
“I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”… Do not doubt
Lady Gaga’s ability—at self-promotion. She goosed “Born This Way,” released Friday, with a
60 Minutes segment and a performance of the song during the first half-hour of the
Grammys telecast. Result: a three-day total of
448k paid downloads. That makes Gaga’s
Madonna homage the third biggest weekly tally ever, behind only
Flo Rida’s “Right Round” with 636k and the
Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” with 465k… One area in which bankrupt
Borders has struggled is its online business. Hurt by pressure from
Amazon and big-box stores like
Wal-Mart, the chain badly lagged behind
Barnes & Noble in establishing a viable online business. In 2001, it linked its online store to Amazon, but waited until 2008 to restart its own e-commerce site…
Rhapsody has issued a statement slamming
Apple's newly announced policy of taking a 30% cut of revenues from sub services generated via
iPhone and
iPad apps. "An Apple-imposed arrangement that requires us to pay 30% of our revenue to Apple, in addition to content fees that we pay to the music labels, publishers and artists, is economically untenable," the long-struggling company stated. "We will be collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development."… Five out of six Americans who go online—171 million people—watched streaming video in January, according to
comScore.
YouTube topped the list of providers with 144.1 million unique viewers, followed by
Vevo (51 million);
Yahoo (48.7 million);
Viacom Digital (48.1 million) and
AOL (44.5 million). Close to 4.9 billion video viewing sessions were recorded last month; the average clip was 5 minutes in length.