Digital music distributor RouteNote has just announced the launch of three new music store partners – Deezer, Napster and Thumbplay Mobile.
RouteNote is the only digital music distribution service that has no upfront costs and provides artists with access to the worlds largest online stores and streaming services. Artists can choose from a growing list of quality partners including iTunes, Amazon mp3, Spotify, eMusic and more.
New partner summary:
Deezer is a French business, but has agreements with all 4 major labels to stream ad-supported music to their 9 million registered users across 35 different countries. In the three years since its launch, Deezer has been voted the most innovative website of 2007 by readers of 01Net, ahead of both Facebook and Dailymotion. Deezer also won the 2008 Red Herring award, for Europe’s most innovative web companies, among various other awards. The proof of their success is really in the number of people listening to music through their service, which keeps on growing. In addition to their music streaming service, Deezer also offers:
- Access to radio channels: Hip Hop, Rock, Electro, Jazz, Live, French Scene, Disco etc.
- Surfing intelligent online radio
- Information about artists, albums, tracks, introducing subscribers to new music
- Sharing playlists, chat and musical tastes with friends via the community of ‘Deezernautes’
- Watch videos
Napster was the first cat among the digital pigeons with it’s peer to peer service, but they’ve come a long way since their rebellious beginnings, and now their subscription service offers both unlimited streaming and a number of DRM free downloads per month, available online and on smartphones in Europe and the USA.
Thumbplay is the largest mobile content provider in the U.S. Operating both web based and mobile services, including licensed music, video and games. They have deals with all the majors, and several independent labels and artists, and now you can get access to their services through RouteNote. Hundreds of millions of cellphones in the US are waiting to download your music.
To get your music live with these music stores and all our other online music partners, sign up for our music distribution service, and get our new music upload tool. You can have your tracks online in minutes, and earning you money in a matter of weeks.
Disclosure: I am the CEO of RouteNote.
There have been a lot of huge companies here in the UK shut down of late because of the economic crisis, such as Woolworths, MFI and others. In the technology world there havent been too many casualties so far. However that being said, it has been reported this morning that Lycos Europe will be closing its doors. A date still hasnt been confirmed but it is rumoured to be before the end of the year.
Lycos Europe, the portal and Web hosting service, said on Wednesday that it has concluded a strategic review process and will shut down operations and seek a sale of remaining assets. The company is separate from Lycos in the U.S., and was launched as a joint venture between Telefonica’s Terra and Bertelsmann.
“As a result of this strategic review process the Management Board and the Supervisory Board of Lycos came to the conclusion that the best available option of the company is to (i) strive for a sale of its domains, Danish portal and shopping activities and (ii) to discontinue the portal and webhosting activities,” the company said.
Lycos Europe will also return about $60 million to its shareholders.
What other technology companies are going to follow in the footsteps of Lycos? It tends to be old brands that are struggling to actually build a strong brand in this ever growing environment. My tip has to be on Napster being of the big boys to close its doors very soon!
Napster has hinted that the company is up for sale again, saying in its response to a dissident shareholder group that the company is once again exploring possible strategic alternatives, and has retained UBS Investment Bank to assist in the process. The company hired UBS two years ago to explore a possible sale, but no deal emerged. Napster informed shareholders of the move in a letter that also said the company believes that three proposed dissident board candidates are “unqualified.”
The company said the dissident candidates “have offered no specific business plan, other than suggesting a vague review of Napster’s business,” and also “have no significant ownership in Napster and, in fact, have been frequent sellers of Napster stock.”
Napster instead urged shareholders to re-elect its current slate of independent directors.
I predicted something like this happening to Napster back in December of last year. Napster has a business model that was rapidly decreasing and they didn’t even look like changing it. The company has a great brand, but they are still just moving in the wrong direction. A download store was never going to be right for this brand, they should have done something ad supported and in the same market as Imeem, build a community around this great brand. I so wish I had control of this brand!
I made my prections for 2008 about 2 weeks ago and already Napster seems to have listened to me and they are now more open to DRM free solutions. Napster just announced that they will be abandoning DRM completely in its music download store in the second quarter of this year. Napster will still however apply copyright protection to its subscription service, but when a user purchases an a la carte download the files will no longer be in DRM WMA format, but in Mp3 format.
This is a very positive move for Napster because they are currently in approximately 5th in download store ratings, behind iTunes, eMusic, Amazon and Rhapsody. This move and forward thinking is slowly getting pushed upon online download stores from the major record labels, and it is very refreshing to see Napster is trying to improve their position in the market and jumping on board the DRM free before some of the others.
Insound.com has been acquired by Warner Music Group. Well the site was actually acquired by The Alternative Distribution Alliance, which is an independent distributor owned by Warner. This is quite a good acquisition for the ADA because Insound has a very good back end infrastructure that can be exploited by ADA to provide their own digital store. The site itself will continue to be operated by co-founder Matt Wishnow, hence a good deal for both parties involved.
Napster in a very interesting move has raised their monthly subscription fees. In true Napster style this was done in an email sent to subcriber, which stated the non-portable subscription rate will increase from $10 per month to $13. A 30% increase! Although this price change is Napsters first in four years, I really cant see this doing them any favours in the market that they are drastically behind in at the moment. These prices changes will take affect on January 30. I made a very bold prediction and said that they will be heading towards the dead pool by the end of 2008, so im very keen to see how much of an affect this price increase will have on the company.
Napster have announced that they are dumping their desktop client and re-launching with a new web-based version. Napster customers will now be able to listen to their music from any computer anywhere in the world. This will hopefully enable Napster to also develop embeddable widgets that can push their products on possible web enabled devices.
Napster is still going to be based as a subscription model, which most industry experts think is holding back the company, because it makes Napster incompatible with the iPod. Consequently Napster has lagged behind Apple’s end to end iTunes system which reportedly controls 70% of the digital music market.
UMG has announced they are now happy with iTunes and the revenue split, so it is only a matter of time before DRM free becomes standard and Napster will really need to gain some market share before Apple.
If you would like to see a slideshow of the new Napster service, please head over to Crave.
Deezer is a French business, but has agreements with all 4 major labels to stream ad-supported music to their 9 million registered users across 35 different countries. In the three years since its launch, Deezer has been voted the most innovative website of 2007 by readers of 01Net, ahead of both Facebook and Dailymotion. Deezer also won the 2008 Red Herring award, for Europe’s most innovative web companies, among various other awards. The proof of their success is really in the number of people listening to music through their service, which keeps on growing. In addition to their music streaming service, Deezer also offers:
