Emusic.com, the pioneer among online music sites, has been sold, and, more importantly, is scaling back its service. It’s still the only service offering downloads in the standard MP3 format, still has the best selection of independent labels, but is now owned by Dimensional Associates LLC, a private equity group, but has limited its main subscriber base, paying… Read More »
More on disguised branding, this time with newspaper-related sites. Steve Outing points out on Poynter that newspapers are putting up bloglike sites to appeal to the younger crowd, while playing down the site’s connections to the owner. Steve cites the Arizona Daily Star’s AZNightBuzz, where “there’s no indication on the home page that the site… Read More »
Further to my posting about AkibaLive, and my comments that it was a marketing tool masquerading as a blog, here’s the owner’s reply (I won’t post his earlier message, since as he says, it was “fired it off in a state of unexpected agitation”): Your blog about AkibaLive has an evident tone that we are somehow… Read More »
At first glance AkibaLive looks like a cool new blog on Japanese gadgets. But it’s not. It’s a marketing gimmick by Dynamism.com, “the leading U.S. retailer of next-generation electronics from Japan and around the globe”. The press release says it all: “Retailers have yet to leverage the targeted, personal impact blogging has on consumers,” it… Read More »
A positive early review of Musicmatch’s new online music store, from Paul Thurrott of WinInfo Update. “Musicmatch Downloads also has some unique advantages over competing services, such as higher-quality downloadable songs,” he says. Musicmatch Downloads currently offers more than 200,000 songs for download, and the company says that more than 500,000 songs will be available by… Read More »