The Death Of Musicbank
from the case-study-for-problems-in-online-music dept
As some of you know, someone involved with Techdirt used to do some work at Musicbank, so we used to hear all sorts of stories about what was going on there. Now, 6 months or so after they collapsed, the San Jose Merc has an article describing the death of MusicBank as a case study in how difficult it is to build an online music site. At one point, it seemed like the company had it all – since they actually had licenses from all five of the major labels to allow their music to be streamed out of music lockers. I had seen a demo of their product, and I’ll admit that it was pretty cool. However, some say they paid such ridiculous sums to get those licenses, under such restricted terms there was no way to actually make money with them. Add to that (of course) some crazy dot-com style expenditures (renting out the Playboy mansion and hosting Howard Stern’s birthday bash???) and you get a sense of what went wrong.
