One Less Online Music Store To Deal With
from the let-others-cannibalize-our-business! dept
In early 2003 a group of the top brick-and-mortar music retail shops announced plans for a unified downloadable music store that got lots of attention. We were a bit skeptical, assuming (like most companies) they wouldn’t really want to cannibalize their existing business models and would come up with something that was expensive and weak. They didn’t even get that far. Without ever launching, they’ve pulled the plug on the program, claiming that there’s just not enough business in online music sales for it to matter to them. While it’s nice that there’s not “yet another” online music store offering music that won’t work with any music you buy from any other music download store, this is quite a statement on how these stores view downloadable music. Downloadable music is much more of a threat to the record stores’ business models than the record labels, yet the stores have mostly decided to put their heads in the sand and assume it’s not worth worrying about. Someone ought to send them a copy of The Innovator’s Dilemma.
