Earlier today we detailed the chaotic history and recent trouble at TotalMusic, an experimental music initiative created by Sony BMG and Universal Music Group designed to rethink the way music was streamed on the web. After a round of layoffs and the shutdown of Ruckus, a streaming music service acquired by TotalMusic last year, the company looked like it was in bad shape. In what will likely be the most official statement we’ll get, Jason Herskowitz, the company’s VP of Product Management, has confirmed in a blog post that the music labels have indeed pulled the plug on TotalMusic:
And so it goes. And, so do I. I know what you are thinking… “Hey Herskowitz, you were only there 3 months, how did you manage to screw it up so quickly?!”. Heh… all I can say is that in that short time I had the privilege of working with some great people on something that I *know* was going to be extremely compelling. I regret that we didn’t get to show you guys more about what we built – but in these extremely hard economic times (particularly for those in the music industry) it’s hard to blame them from pulling the plug on a still-highly-speculative offering .
Herskowitz’s post is worth reading, if for no other reason to affirm that there are at least some people in the music industry who know that things need to change for online music streaming to become a viable business. And where does he think the labels should turn for innovation? Startups.
But, from where I sit at least, I see all of the innovation in digital music services coming out of bootstrapped companies and passionate tinkerers. Hell, there are very few private investors or venture capitalists that want to get anywhere near this space right now… and rightfully so considering no one has really figured out how to make any money out of this industry (and its products) that so many people love.
Herskowitz has also thrown together a few music mashups (some of which are likely of questionable legality), which are worth checking out. Among them is Friendp3, which offers a list of songs that have recently been listened to by his friends on Last.fm (note that this only shows songs that were played by his friends).
In a way it’s disappointing that TotalMusic has run its course – the music industry is desperately in need of innovation, and it sounds like the initiative was making some progress, even if it wasn’t quite tangible yet. Of course, while TotalMusic may be gone in its current form (whatever that was meant to be), don’t be surprised if the record companies band together again once the economy settles down. After all, TotalMusic has come back from the dead before.
This confirms once again that putting money into an online music venture has about as much chance of success as the Jamaican blobsled team winning the gold medal.
Unless you happen to be Steve Jobs, this is an awful business.
Anjali Sen
http://smartbab...xy.blogspot.com
Awful business if you’re trying to re-invent the wheel…
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I’m part of a team that is working on a model for the music industry. We believe we have “figured it out”. A golden solution!
As we approach investors, we are experiencing this “tough economic times” speech. Of course if you’re offering a service that competes with the current trends – torrents, and free streaming, you’re going to have trouble. The investors that do “get it”, understand what we’re trying to do… have been a little cautious. And for that I blame all of the start-ups out there that are trying to re-invent myspace, or lastfm, or the cd burner. It seems pretty obvious. Our service is different, and addresses the fundamental logic of the industry.
What is our idea, that I’m claiming will re-balance the music/web-music industry? It’s not ready to be shared with the general public. Our service focuses on the needs of the creative community, the music business, and fans. Investors, labels, fans, let’s talk. Let’s get this thing rolling.
“We believe we have “figured it out”. A golden solution!”
“What is our idea, that I’m claiming will re-balance the music/web-music industry? It’s not ready to be shared with the general public.”
“Our service focuses on the needs of the creative community, the music business, and fans.”
As an investor, I salute you. Your comment displays the kind of magical thinking, delusional belief, and utter lack of evidence that makes me feel good about grabbing my checkbook and scurrying out of a meeting room like a meth-maddened cockroach on steroids.
No one wants another service. The paying public has spoken with a deafening voice. They want what iTunes already (mostly) does: Control of their purchases for a fair price with a minimum of hassle.
Whatever tries to displace iTunes will have to be a couple of orders of magnitude better, in terms of pleasing the public, to even stand a chance. Good luck.
Nonsense. I want something new.
I want Rhapsody with Pandora bolted onto it and more information about the music (who played, sang, mixed and produced each piece) and the players to let me understand it better, see the understand connections.
I want the service to return keyword search results with music, artists and other info pulled from not just song/album/band titles, but the whole suite of metadata suggested above.
I want it to load up my iPod each morning with new, rented music I’ve never heard.
And the service should incorporate social features to let me pick through what friends, family, others are listening to or like.
By the way, yes, I would pay for it.
“Nonsense. I want something new.”
It’s already available and its an extremely cool piece of software. -> http://www.spotify.com
we’ve just launched our site in secret. every time you buy a file, you get to pay a friend;
in 8 month time we will come out with a player which is p2p allowing everyone to make money; the artist, the downloader.
this will be merged with the website; like itunes.
To be honest with you iTunes is a fraud in comparison to free p2p activity.
Think I’m lying? Tell Apple to restrict iPods, iPhones, and iTouches to iTunes purchased content only.
see what I mean, their empire will crumble overnight.
Oh, and remember the nice little subliminal sticker message that use to come with your new iPod:
“Don’t download illegal music.”
lol, the greatest joke of the millennium.
Ray, my friend, you are in for a very bad disappointing experience if you plan to go deal with these music labels. If you have a product that will revolutionize music forever, these labels will not care one bit and they are trained to not see real innovation. All they will do is try to steal whatever you have, thats it. If you are not coming to them with $25,000,000 and you have plans to sell a really cool device that the kids will love… Please take my advice and cater your talents for the TV and film industry as this is where good new services and technology is appreciated.
Why don’t Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner sell their own music from their own websites? Ask yourself this question. They only operate to find a sucker, the “sucker” is anyone willing to pay “up-front” for the “rights” to license their catalogs. If they are not brave enough to sell their own products, anyone willing to sell it for them are just down right fools.
Be smart, forget music… no one cares because all the great music has already been made and nothing these current “acts” can make today can even match the classics of yesterday.
Bittorrent, Limewire, and Rapidshare are running the music industry forever now… In 3 years all the labels will be gone once the government decides to stop funding them (how do you think they stayed alive this long?)
There is NOTHING you can introduce that will be better than the free shit everyone gets from the well know p2p networks…
Go into services for the TV and film industry and make a living, put out a music app and drown with the labels.
Good luck.
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Torpedoed from the inside by those who would become extinct should the music industry evolve?
Collusion between RIAA and the people who artificially insert themselves between the Consumer and the artist?
There is more to this story than what is being publicly said.
Shame… was looking forward to Total Music
shame!
I was a fan.
bad news for music indutry
Bad news for music site. They haven’t any chance for growing up
My impression of why investors are afraid of this space is because they fear that the music industry will torpedo their startups. Kind of like what happened to Total Music. Each time a startup becomes the least bit viable in this area the music industry is there demanding cash and running up the legal bills. Apple is the only company with enough power to fend off their lawyers.
Everyone knows perfect copy protection is locking the music in a box and throwing away the key.
Correction:
Apple is the only company that was smart enough to know that back in 2001, while the world was using PCs, those snobs in the music industry worship the Mac as the computing platform of choice. Because these label jerks are so enclosed in their own world and out of touch with consumers, these idiots believed the whole world used Macs because they all use them. With only 2% of the consumer computing market space, Steve Jobs seeing the labels infatuation with the Mac platform started to distribute free prototypes of the iPod to label executives promising that it with be a MAC EXCLUSIVE PRODUCT, and all the labels, who love to feel like their being catered to at all times, jumped with glee at this new prospect of STEALING the model introduced by Diamond Rio and Napster with their new friends at Apple…
Adding a clause to indemnify Apple from any and all future possibilities of lawsuits and recourse, Apple hands the RIAA $25,000,000 to license all catalogues for the iTunes store.
Apple releases the first iPod which is a MAC only product and only accepts songs from the iTunes music store and no one cares, it doesn’t sell well at first.
Being that they had that lofty clause in the agreement with the labels, Apple decided to open the iPod to MP3 files and make it WINDOWS compatible…
BOOM
History
Remember,
“Don’t download illegal music.”
Wow, that’s one tight tin-foil hat you’re wearing.
“Apple releases the first iPod which is a MAC only product and only accepts songs from the iTunes music store and no one cares, it doesn’t sell well at first.”
Hmmm… the iPod was released 18 months before the iTunes Music Store was launched, so it would have been capable of time travel in order to “only” accept songs from the iTMS. Prior to that, you had to add your own music to the library — remember the Rip/Mix/Burn campaign?
If you’re so willing to revise history for something as frivolous as an iPod, what will you do for things that really matter? War, race, government, economics…
Oh i’m sorry that the Mac users are offended that the iPod was failing before it hit Windows and excepted pirated MP3s.
But it didn’t sell at all until it hit Windows, a known fact.
For the music industry to put their hopes in a company that only carried a 2% market share shows how smart they are..
All the bafoons had to do was develop and sell thier own player and allow people to get all the music they want for free and split hardware sales…
iPod sales make more money than the global music indusrty at it’s peak, so busy nickle and diming they forgot to look up at the dollar.
For the sake of how Shawn Fanning was ROBBED of his billion dollars, I am happy to say that music will never again be profitable on its own as a product.
2 billion files are traded over p2p daily, Apple and all others combined will never top this.
As the governator says, ‘i’ll be back’, and I think this will apply to the music industry as well.
Agree with Herskowitz’s comments about the source of innovation being the start-ups………something the music industry isn’t all about these days.
It’s like the assembly line workers as the robot arms were replacing them. It’s clearly better for everyone- BUT the people who are getting replaced won’t go without a fight. They just need to figure out a different way of working in that environment, a way that doesn’t oppose innovation/efficiency.
Seems like all the middle-men are annoyed that they are going to be made obsolete. Instead of whining, they should be working at these music startups trying to figure this ish out.
“all of the innovation in digital music services coming out of bootstrapped companies and passionate tinkerers”
Sadly, none of these people have, you know, rights to the music and are in far more danger of getting shut down than precarious internal projects like Total Music
jhersokowitz is a bright guy and i doubt he was the reason for TotalMusic’s demise. it looks like he got in at a time to “save” the fledging initiative, but it must have been a little too late.
“I see all of the innovation in digital music services coming out of bootstrapped companies and passionate tinkerers.” he speaks the truth right there.
In general, user-generated content/data is the solution to music discovery, and we’ll be introducing a solution soon enough.
No, Jason was not at all the reason, Jason was a pleasure to work with and I hold him in high regard. Simply put, it’s a sign of the economic times, and I, like Jason, regret not being able to show everyone what was built. It *was* different, and at any other economic time might have been great.
C’est la vie, I suppose, and I hope that the industry figures itself out.l
Wow, I did not doubt this would happen. That stinks for them. The music industry is getting crushed by all the free apps being built and new devices. As you all know they even tried selling albums in stores via a card with a code that you can download. Currently if some of you are internet scientist on the board today, there is currently no quick fix for this industry. I read above, someone found the solution. I’m in doubt of your solution working as well. although, I wish you luck on your launch. I personally feel, unless a new platform is created via new signals etc, they will have many more rocky years to come. Although if they work with P2P sharing they can come back from advertising apps via the internet and mobile. They have to stop being so stubborn, greedy, ignorant and keep up with the changes.
I have never used it.was that good ?
Hi there, I’m not sure about any of you guys, but I actually have platinum albums and have produced many records. My feeling is let the record labels crash and burn – they simply deserve it – they don’t pay, they are greedy and have never been known to be forward thinking. These 360 deals are BS. BTW – I now run a successful music licensing company and own 100% of all of my music. I’m making more money now then I ever did even from multi-platinum album sales. So you see, money from albums never really mattered….
Good news Mikey,
I know guys that have platinum records and still owe the label $230,000 in recoupment while the label makes $8,000,0000 from the unit sales.
Anyone doing a 360 deal with the labels for less than $10,000,000 (enough to live on the interest for the artist) are looking to fail.
Anyone getting a 360 deal will just be doing what people like you are doing for yourself anyway.
I got a call from Universal the other month for a service job, and acted like I was supposed to be honored to get the call, I told them promptly, “Listen, seriously by the time the 6 months it’s going to take me to get paid from you people, I will already will have made that fee 40X… No thanks, ill pass.”
5 years ago, I would have never passed on a major label gig.. but now they are just in the way.
Once a year or so I go back and reread the 2004 LA Weekly article entitled A Small New Future (http://www.lawe...mall-new-future). To this day it’s the best commentary on the music biz.
“The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren’t that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music’s annoying, or at the very least they don’t need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.”
—T-Bone Burnett
wow
> don’t be surprised if the record companies band
> together again once the economy settles down
Once upon a time this would have been called “collusion” but in these days of greed, it’s called “innovation.”
The better solution would be to smash the RIAA into a million pieces and get true competition amongst labels. But cartels have money, money talks, the rest of us listen if we have the money to pay said cartels.
Having to deal with the music industry/RIAA itself would scare me from investing in startups in general, unless they had powerful cash and figures behind them.
The sinking of an industry might not necessarily be due to managerial inadequacies. There are lots of factor that could be responsible for such, example is the global economic shut down, which is effecting all financial sectors.
You can read http://fnc0486....rends-to-watch/ for how best technologically you could survive.
People love to stream and listen to music. So if you have a great service, people will listen. The popularity of services like Last.fm, Pandora, Deezer and Myspace has proven this. The best example of what can be achieved with new ideas and smart programming is, in my opinion. Spotify. So there is still money to be made, if you have the right product.
Don’t let them stop the music. Music business models come and go but Music is Forever.
the sad part of this is that the concept behind the labels creating a backend to support free to consumer ad supported services was an incredibly forward thinking thing coming from an industry known for dragging its feet. now, when the labels are hurting the most, they’re killing something that has the potential to create significant revenue streams when they need it the most. when you’re dying and the economy is in the toilet, isn’t that when you want to try to kill the antiquated models and put some more money into the few things that can save you? all i can say is, when they die a painful death, or at their last gasp of breath, perhaps they’ll get this out. if it wasn’t for jobs forcing them into downloads, they’d have been really screwed. who is going to save them this time? all they really are anymore is their catalogs. there is nothing new coming out that means anything.
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good luck
sdfsdf
hope that music stays alive for longer and longer period and music industry stabilizes.
Perhaps the major record labels should focus their efforts on music services that people are using, like pandora.com, imeem.com, ilike.com, itunes.com and amazon music. It was mentioned before, no point in trying to reinvent the wheel.
“Apple releases the first iPod which is a MAC only product and only accepts songs from the iTunes music store and no one cares, it doesn’t sell well at first.”
Uh, wow. Can someone moderate that completely inaccurate troll?
Agreed. It is nearly impossible for music companies to compete with existing models, especially with iTunes. We recently blogged about the iTunes model for music distribution and why it’s so difficult to compete with. It’s not about the music, and that’s what music executives don’t seem to get. Feel free to comment on our thoughts.
http://www.maur...tunes/#more-274
There are many of us here in the music industry who not only understand the need to turn this ship around, but work everyday to do so. I read your site every single day as part of keeping up with the cutting edge of technology and have set the been among the first to help the music industry adopt much of it. I would love to read less music industry bashing. Especially since you have absolutely no idea what really goes on in here.
There is a major shift afoot in how we consume media in general. We’re moving from a time where corporations provided the gateway to news, music and entertainment to a time where the consumer is the vehicle of media. The TV and Movie industry still has some control over how it presents and releases media, though this is changing too. It’s difficult for companies to adjust quickly when technologies displace their existing process, but in the end, it’s usually the consumer that benefits in more choices or cheaper prices.
There is an interesting parallel here to net neutrality — just on a very superficial level. The idea behind that is that the network is passive, and that it moves all bits as easily as all other bits. The major issue with iTunes and other downloads is that the industry no longer decides which music moves more easily than any other. Music neutrality, in a way — people can spontaneously decide what they like through just talking to one another. Of course TV and movies will still and always play a huge role, but nevertheless, a person’s friendslist can obsess for a few days on some obscure musician that you’d never have had a prayer of finding or even special-ordering in an old record store, and result in a burst of business for that person.
It’s not just iTunes, but the web in general that’s made that possible. It is now EXACTLY as easy for me to find out about, dig up, and buy/download African mbira ensembles as it is to buy/download Van Halen or Placido Domingo.