Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, who has been on a whirlwind tour promoting MySpace Music, his new joint venture with record labels, says that the new service isn’t competitive with Apple and iTunes.
“I think it is a complimentary product to what Apple provides,” DeWolfe said in a phone call earlier today. “It will create more demand for iPod.” He insisted that they didn’t “create this venture as a competitor to Apple.”
I am pretty sure Chris’s record-label partners see this as an iTunes competitor. They would love to be able to stand-up to Apple and its dominant iTunes music store. Of course, these are the same geniuses who will not own-up to the fact that they are incapable of coming up with ways to save their own business.
When Apple came up with its digital record store, they all signed up. But when it did well, they started bitching-and-moaning about Apple and the money it was making from its iPod ecosystem. Apple might have sold over 5 billion songs from its online store, but the company still makes a bulk of its music-related revenues from the sales of iPod players and iPhones.
More from this conversation with DeWolfe to follow later today. Photo by Robert Scoble via Flickr.
I could not understand why if you make the ink, how can you complain about the company that makes the printer and the ink cartridge making more money than you?
The record labels seem to be so stuck on milking CDs for everything they can get that they missed opportunities elsewhere and they screwed their artists so now the artists don’t want 360 deals and have to give up their touring and merchandise money.
What does a big label offer today?
- Deep pockets to pay radio stations to play a song
- Deep pockets to pay MTV to play a video
- Deep pockets to produce really expensive music videos
But the web alters the distribution ecosystem and removes the need for deep pockets to build a rabid fanbase for musicians to make money.
Even MySpace is a great platform to expose your music and build a fan base, without MySpace music. Musicians would give away their music for free if it meant touring and merchandise sales.