iTunes fills the transition, but is an ‘old-world’ product. Charging for something on a per-item basis on works with physical items and scarcity. Can’t charge for dirt, now can you? Ok, maybe high quality dirt. But virtual dirt?

What is a new world product?

http://alonetone.com

Shameless plug (I built this), but it is true. No money, no ads. Just music. Where is the business model? What business model? There’s no money in selling online music! Get over it. Lets say its a ‘finally musicians can run their own show’ model or ‘normal everyday musicians from the last 40 years were shafted by industry’ model or ‘we are liberated and not so interested in getting jailed by some techies scheme of using us’ model.

1) create a cross reference of content across sources – allowing people to find a given cut of a song across the provider of their choice – Smells Like Teen Spirit on Amazon, versus from Rhapsody, versus some other channel. The point being, if someone wants to find a given cut, they want it from where they are familiar. This will allow the sharing of playlists without the inclusion of actual content. This will also dovetail into semantic web behaviors, comparison shopping, etc.

2) Allow JamGlue style remixes to be created from already legally licensed content. Because the music is legally licensed, the reuse of it, i.e., the listening of it in a new or different way, is allowed, and so, if a listener has legally licensed all of the components of a remix, then the user should be allowed to render that remix for their listening pleasure.

To get a good idea of how powerful these remixes are, take a listen to the Bootie “best of” albums, available here for 2005, 6 & 7: http://www.boot...stofbootie2007/

3) Just as 2 (above) allowed for the legal combination of new compositions from existing material, a listener should be allowed to decompose a purchased song into a ring tone.

Last year around this same time I wrote on the then current companies killing DRM (Digital Rights Management, music with restrictions). Coincidentally, this year has the month of January giving us even more news on the battle-for-unrestricted-music fro…

I hope it doesn’t tank.

if music goes free what ancillary products are artists going to advertise? cars? they might be advertising supported soon.

once a downturn in the ad market comes (and it will come) many of these free products will disappear.

Unfortunately, great jobs and Yahoo! don’t go together these days. Yahoo!’s initial music service client app was a disaster (spawning new screens ad infinitum until CTRL-ALT-DEL stopped it), and their online payment system has been badly managed as well.

If their products weren’t bad enough, their marketing (especially PR) teams have performed as if they are embarrassed for the products and are actually trying to hide them.

Come to think of it, Yahoo! and MSFT vs Google has begun to appear like a cheesy horror film, where Yahoo! and MSFT are the two dumb teens doing Darwin Award-worthy stupid stuff while Google chases them around. To push it too far, Yahoo! is the cute girl, since we in the audience are willing to root against MSFT.

No more caffeine this morning….

besides, all things being equal (as it is becoming with the the crumbling of the Great Wall of DRM), leadership makes the difference. my best wishes Ian.

I agree with “all music, all places, all times”, but just like the power of major record labels, subscription services are also a thing of the past. As a parallel indication, the last of the major online newsources, The Wall Street Journal, will even be shifting gears in the very near future to join the others as advertisement-based.

I think Yahoo creating a MUSIC platform, considering as Mike said they are “the world’s largest music site”, would be phenomenal! Along with 2 others, I have been developing my own social network music website centered around providing the ultimate resource or furthering music discovery, and attaching ourselves with Yahoo (if they provide a platform) could well be an option down the road.

Sounds like Rogers is heading in the right direction. Very interested to hear what’s in store..