Universal Music Group (the largest record label in the world) has told Apple that it plans not to renew its contract to sell its music via the iTunes Store. Now personally, I hate iTunes because every penny you spend there screws you in the long term by locking you into Apple products if you want to go on enjoying your music. (That's because the iTunes Store sells mostly DRM-crippled music, tunes that are locked with anti-copying technology.)
But the fact is that iTunes works- people like buying music over the net and there's no question that iTunes makes it easy to do that. Hence, they've become a huge success.
In a twisted (and utterly stupid) attempt to regain some leverage in the music marketplace, Universal is now saying that they won't sell music through iTunes anymore. That's right, they're going to pull their entire music catalog off of iTunes.
Somehow the idiots at Universal think that cutting off one of the few successful outlets for their product is supposed to help them. LOL!
If this is the smartest plan they can come up with, how much longer do you think companies like Universal will continue to thrive in the marketplace? The answer is "not very long". They need to step into the '90s, because with clever marketing decisions like this they're doomed, repeat [span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"]DOOMED [/span]to failure. And no doubt they'll blame their falling revenues on "piracy". Mark my words.
[a href="vny!://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/business/media/02universal.html?ex=1341028800&en=64687402344443f8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss"]Link To The Stooopidity[/a]
