gBox: Give The Gift Of DRM-Free Music
Nick Gonzalez
36 comments »
gBox is a new take on selling digital content. Instead of emphasizing sales directly to consumers, gBox is encourages you to create wish lists and buy gifts for your friends and family. To kick-start the service, they’ve sealed a pretty big deal with Universal to be the retailer for their new “Open MP3″ experiment into DRM free music. In a move that’s a snub to Apple’s iTunes, Universal will be buying Google AdWords for their music, linking people to the gBox site to buy their artists’ music. gBox will be expanding to other forms of digital content in the future.
gBox is not only a destination retail site for digital content. It also has an embeddable gift box widget to show off what you want to your friends. Your friends can then buy it for you directly from within the widget. It will be available as a general embed or specialized for 7 of the big social networks (no Facebook). Their current offering, music, will go for 99 cents per track and $9.99 per album (to stay competitive with iTunes). You have to have a gBox account to receive a gift, but not to buy one.
Considering people already pay 99 cents to send their friends virtual gifts on Facebook, I’d expect buying a real song to be an attractive proposition. It also seems like a missed opportunity for a network like MySpace, which runs on Snocap.
You can download the content after its bought for you, but need a special gBox plugin to control the downloads since some content partners (Sony, IODA) will be selling music with DRM. This makes the offering somewhat disappointing, because the plugin will only work for IE (FF on the way) and not on the Mac.
gBox was started in June as an angel funded spin-off from Navio systems. They’re a 20 person company based in Cupertino, California.
DRM free musics are good for sharing, besides that I liked the gift management features of gBox most.
Rajesh Shakya
http://www.rajeshshakya.com
What other forms of Digital Content will gbox be expanding into, Videos and eBooks?
Excellent. Now, instead of dropping ridiculous hints about what I want for Hanukkah, or god forbid having someone acutally THINK or ASK about what to get me, I can just put my selections on the gbox widget and never have to worry about the annoyance of human interaction again. At least where gift buying in music form is considered. Now all they have to do is develop a mind reading program for gbox so in the future I don’t have to inconvenience myself by entering my gift selections, the program would already know what I want.
Smart but not new a idea. With the growth in sales of digital products and the holidays coming up it seem this company will do just fine.
Wishing does not hurt and it could yield profits for retailers.
I wish that more products on my wish list would be purchased.
Google should buy this and expand their G offerings.
A new take on selling digital content. What? Not focusing sales directly on consumers…you make a list, then YOU buy stuff for other people. So wait, doesn’t that mean I’m still a consumer, and iisn’t the point still to sell stuff. C’mon, how many ways can you bs about the same thing?
iTunes gift cards are fairly dominant in the holiday season, several years running — why would I need to know or care what tracks were desired when the pricing is fairly uniform? Not to mention, the cards are impulse items in the checkout line every Safeway, Target and WalMart.
The gifting interaction on social networks is interesting, but I expect they’ll need to escape the music space in order to succeed long-term.
A cute twist on a not-so-novel ideal. I found the overall experience to be quite confusing. A wish list dedicated to music downloads is of limited use. Doesn’t Amazon have a wish list for MySpace or Facebook? I think I’ll wait for that.
Crappy idea that will never take off…why are these companies even started…they’re just Deadpool bait..
gbox is pretty nice. I may want free music rather than useless gifts.
This company is not a Google company?
You click on a Google ad to find gBox. You are then shown ads on the site. Finally, when you close gBox there’s a pop under ad from Classmates.com. This site isn’t about gifting. It’s about blasting you with ads.
I could not find most of my favorite bands. I did find something I want to gift my dad but the sliding pop-up keeps saying processing. I’m not sure what it’s processing, I’m not buying anything. Should it just add it to a list? I like the Christmas theme, puts you in the mood for giving. I wonder if it automatically changes themes for different holidays or do I have to change it? There are too many gifting options at my favorite shopping sites I hope this application replaces all of them so I only have one to deal with one.
Okay, someone thought the Zoho logo was bad. This thing is an atrocity.
Beyond that, I think this “service,” which is really a feature, is further proof that the goal of most of these developers is to get to a million users and hope someone buys you.
How many different social networks and tools do we really need?
Got a nice “go have coitus with yourself” message in Safari. Thx for nothing, Gbox.
Generally, while we can’t touch, most sites at least let Mac users look. Are they using DRM free WMA files?
Slightly annoyed,
Randy
speaking of DRM-Free music… I just noticed wal-mart is selling a new Eagles album in 256kbps mp3s… With all the hub-bub about DRM free downloads… I wonder why this isn’t getting talked about more…? Do people just hate wal-mart that much?
I got blocked using a Firefox on a Mac. What kind of weak ass web app needs to restrict users to a specific operating system an browser? I will wait for their competitor(s) who will probably hire better programmers.
Orkut have a similar list, not?
Thiago
http://www.ideavertising.com.br
It seems to me it’s going to take a lot more innovation and ingenuity than what gbox is doing to dethrone iTunes. If they just want to capture part of the market - maybe the part that is not currently using iTunes Store - then this might be a cool idea on some level. People do seem to like wish lists, and showing off “what you think is cool this week,” and clothing it in the form of a “please buy me this” list might be moderately successful for them - but what some company needs to do right now is come up with the idea that is as distinct as the idea of a “social networking site” was at a time before we had social networking sites in order to actually change the game. This is just a rehash and a mish-mosh of some other things we’ve already been doing - and some of the other players are already doing it right.
I hate that logo but somehow I’m drawn to it! Weird.
DJs were selling their itunes lists a while back. I don’t know if that was ever monetized as a company. I bought a list from Sasha & Digweed - they compiled a list of 100 songs - was pretty good. But it was for my itunes, couldn’t really give it to someone else.
Too bad you can only use it if you are on a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, the one two punch…
Nick - now come on - you know the rule already, link ONLY to crunchbase for any company that is not owned by TC or is a friend. How many times does Heather have to tell you? At least you fixed it now. Please follow the rule from now on.
Cute idea, but more desperate than anything. Selling MP3 downloads is just the digital extension of the “moving units” model that has become obsolete in the post-Napster era. This whole giftbox idea is just another example of “an exception of charity rather than a rule of commerce.”
I write about it at length at my brad spankin new blog: http://freshbreakfast.com/2007.....-industry/
…a distinct idea like social networking…
Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web and other aspects of the Internet. BBSes were a highly social phenomenon and were used for meeting people and having discussions in message boards as well as for publishing articles, downloading software, playing games and many more things using a single application.
This is a pretty poor idea. It was hailed as a collaboration of Google and Universal but it looks like something some college kids threw together over a weekend.
And… without a micro-payments system this model won’t gain momentum.
I went to gBox and selected the mp3 music format and unchecked the iPod and Windows formats. After doing that, I didn’t recognize any of the artists. Is that REALLY the Universal catalog? I must be getting old. Bummer. Maybe I’ll just go and buy a non-Universal mp3 on iTunes!
The interface is clumsy… not what I’d expect from a Google backed company at all. I didn’t find any artists that I was looking for… but I did find a bunch of stuff that looks like some weird indie label. Nice enough idea, poor execution.
Confusing and bad UI layout and poor graphic design; looks like they cut corners and hired a high school student for the site.
It’s “processing” so I conclude that they also hired high school students to do the development over th course of a weekend. If it took longer than that, someone wasted a lot of money.
Surprised Google and Universal put their name on this.
Somehow I feel that I’m flogging the pony on this one. I agree with Bryan. Music will be free. I have invested time and money into a business model(s) built around selling songs, and now we are going 180.
There is something wrong with creating songs, shooting videos, building MySpace pages and etc. etc. to sell songs that return about .69 cents to the label/artist. It’s all backwards. Give away the songs to sell everything else.. None of it is worth doing for .69 cents (or less). I am putting my money where my mouth is… Music will be free soon and business models built around selling tracks will fizzle.
Read reason number 1 - why music will be free… (9 more coming)…
http://songboost.blogspot.com/.....son-1.html
Random thoughts:
So Google is redirecting it’s users to a Web site that shows non-Google ads. I thought gBox was Google-backed (according to some other articles I read)? Brilliant.
I hate popup ads and can not understand how an alleged Web 2.0 company would dare to launch in 2007 with a business model circa 1996.
What’s this “00 - Hot Score”? Are they gonna tell my how hot I am based on what I have in my wish list? No thanks.
I actualy like the online demo. Very well done. However, it goes to show how convoluted the user experience is. How can Google put it’s name behind something like this?
The positioning vis-a-vis iTunes is ridiculous. This ain’t an iTunes killer. In fact doesn’t gBox support iPod/iTunes music format (although not from a Mac). I’d think they wanna play nice with Mr. Jobs and his billion+ download music site.
All in all, not bad for a company that just launched in June. Hopefully they’ll quickly fix some of these limitations. A gifting widget for social networks is a fine idea.
A fine idea, but really poorly executed. Someone else will take this idea and turn it into gold.