Mark Mulligan – More shots at Apple via YouTube speculation
Mark Mulligan – More shots at Apple
Another wild card that could upset the Apple cart is EMI (again) and Warner’s negotiations with YouTube over potentially having free music video content available funded by ad revenues. Apart from this being another indication that premium paid content models are still failing to make up meaningful ground on free models…
I think Mark Mulligan gets this absolutely wrong. There is no overwhelming indication that paid content is failing anywhere is there? At least he doesn’t cite any other than a straw man (cough, YouTube, cough).
Basically the notion he puts forth is people will never buy content again. Why? Because YouTube may be offering music videos for free; and, Microsoft apparently has an idea to boot strap sales of it’s vaporware “Zune” mp3 player with pre-loaded content (oh, you mean like the U2 iPod?!?!?!).
The straw man here is two-fold. YouTube in anyone’s wildest wet dream will become a streaming radio station (which by the way will be easy to freely pirate). Microsoft will only bootstrap sales of the Zune with pre-loaded content for how long? And to what audience niches? Based on artist? Top 40? Charts?
It’s an insane idea. For some reason the tech media and now Jupiter analysts have a feeding frenzy anytime they can wedge a so-called “iPod Killer” into their world view. I don’t care two shakes about iPod dominance (i took my profits on AAPL) but it is the best product out there and provides much better user to music interface AND user to paid digital content than anything else on the market. Plus, I can still buy CDs, which I do because I’ll never saddle myself with content I have paid for but am not allowed to actually own. I have explained my dislike of DRM in the past.
It’s too bad Jupiter doesn’t have the stones to have trackbacks on their posts. This one would get hammered (no, not by some fictional apple faithful) by clear headed consumers.