Not The Echo They Were Looking For
from the try,-try-again dept
Earlier this week we a story about the big US music retailers teaming up to create an online music distribution system called Echo. At the time, I said that it didn’t sound promising, and I expected they would make all the same mistakes that everyone else was making. Now Jimmy Guterman has chimed in with his reasons why Echo will fail. First off, they haven’t secured a single license yet. While the record companies responded with vaguely optimistic quotes to the news, you would think that with a deal this big, it would have made sense to get some licenses in the bag before you made the announcement. Next, these record stores don’t seem to have any clue how they’re going to set up such a system, and spoke about such past failures as in-store kiosks. In the end, the record stores have the same problem as the music labels. They’re looking at the business from the wrong angle: how do we sell music. The proper way to look at it is: how can we use digital music to build our business.
