I had a nice chat last week with someone from Wired who is totally in sync with Apple’s idea of digitizing all music. She found me via the post on the Apple conference call (Apple to Music Industry: Monetize Your IP).
Here’s your ubiquitous excerpt:
“On the conference call about the first birthday of the iTunes Music Store, Jobs said that getting such songs online is one of the next hurdles for online services and the music industry. In general, he said, labels have less than a third of the music in their vaults available for sale because it’s too expensive to distribute such CDs to stores.
But to make songs available online, record companies wouldn’t have to press CDs, get them to stores and worry about returns. “It’s a one-time cost,” Luke said. “Once it’s been encoded and delivered, it’s in the digital marketplace.”
And if anyone can get the labels to open the vaults, Jobs can, analysts said.
“What Jobs is saying is, ‘We’d be happy to take all this content that is rotting away in warehouses and turn it into a new revenue source for you,'” said Barry Ritholtz, a market strategist with Maxim Group, a money-management firm. “It’s probably a bit much to say Jobs is saving the music industry, but he’s showing them the way into the digital age. They have been stumbling around drunk in the dark.”
My favorite line in the article: Despite iTunes’ collaboration with Motown, “95 percent of the vast Motown catalog is still unavailable to the public” digitally on line.
Unbelievable.
Source:
Apple Wants to Open Song Vaults
By Katie Dean
Wired, 02:00 AM May. 12, 2004 PT
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,63351,00.html
See also:
iPod All the Rage in High Fashion
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,63423,00.html
Joe Bussard’s Vintage 78s
Joe Bussard has spent a lifetime pursuing rare surviving examples of early 20th century American music. His private archive contains more than 25,000 obscure recordings from the golden age of old-time music. Now he shares it with the world