Passalong Passes
It appears that DSP Passalong has ridden off into the sunset, yet another victim of the crashing digital music space that exists outside of Apple and Amazon. This proves once again that the only parties that can operate in the business are the big boys who don’t rely on digital music sales for their livelihood. And, of course, the major labels don’t give a shit about anybody other than the big guys as they have proven that they are lousy partners and only care about squeezing a large cash advance out of anybody they do business with. This certainly helps speed the demise of any start-up and makes it harder to even get funding because VC’s don’t want their money going toward advance to partners who don’t give a shit about your success, no matter how much they claim that they do. With the record labels it is always “heads I win, tails you lose”. The result is that it doesn’t pay to try to play above board with these guys. And that theory seems to have been proven accurate as recently the start-ups who have gained traction without going through the gordian licensing process semm to have been rewarded for their “illegal” activity with not only big licensing deals but also, as in the case of Imeem, record label investment! (See VEVO as well). It’s all sickening.
One of my readers passed this little tip on to me the other day. It is a Facebook post made by Passalong SVP Skip Franklin looking back and opining on what he learned from his experience. I found it to be interesting. Skip, the floor is yours:
Whew …what a great 5-year ride at PassAlong Networks, with plenty of ups and downs, twists and turns, that leaves me pondering, what exactly have i learned?
The primary thing I’ve learned is that the digital music model is a very difficult puzzle to solve and that we’re still a decade away from fully solving it.
My five observations:
1) That there has not been enough experimentation with the physical retail packaging of music. I look at what the movie industry is doing at retail and wonder what it will take for the music industry to follow their lead in terms of packaging, value, add-ons, special content, and pricing.
2) The domination of Apple is astonishing and close to unprecedented. As great as their closed ecosystem works, history has sided with the open systems. Most mature markets have 5 solid players with the leader ending up with around 50% or less market share, whether Hertz, Ford, or Coca Cola. It will take some serious partnerships and billion-dollar bets to end up with 5 serious competitors by 2012. Hard to see those kind of bets happening in this present economy. And so Apple will continue to have a free ride…a well earned free ride.
3) The Plays-for-Sure disaster. The king of operating systems and open platforms failed in the digital music space by not creating a “windows” for digital music for the hardware manufacturers. I never thought i’d see the day. Oh, will we ever see my Microsoft of 1987-1990 again? I think not. (I must comment that there are lots of Microsofters like Chad Hodge, David Fester, Kevin Unangst, Bill Spencer, David Kaill, et al that really understood the space; they just didn’t get the top-down support)
4) Paradigm shift for how music is consumed. The list is too long; and the arguments on all sides even longer. But like all of the music shifts in the past, from orchestras to sheet music, player pianos to records, radio to music videos, things will never be the same again. And in spite of the paralyzing fear and loathing from music professionals, i fully expect in ten years that the total Music Pie will dwarf what it was in the prior “heyday” …who ever said paradigm shifts were painless? or expedient!
5) That the Consumer-centric Ecosystem will result in an amazing empowerment of the individual. But a foundation of simple worldwide licensing, seamless transactions, auto-library synchronization is prerequisite …and will lead to new forms of music discovery and music consumption that will amaze all of us.
Farewell for now.
I’m off to fight another fight!!
© 2009, Wayne Rosso. All rights reserved.
