Opinion: Over at Bit Player: Google goes to China
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
If you aren’t checking out Jon Healey’s Bit Player blog on a regular basis, break that habit by reading this analysis of Google’s China music effort, which aims to make legal downloads available in the Middle Kingdom. Says Healey:
If Google wins support from all the major record companies (only Universal Music Group has signed on so far, according to the Journal, and Silicon Valley Insider questioned even UMG’s participation), it will have pushed the music industry closer than it’s ever been before to a model that depends on advertisers, not consumers, to pay the freight.
One reason the Long Tail thesis has been so hard for old-school media companies to swallow is that when you’re used to selling bazillions of copies of a few blockbusters, it’s hard to build a Giganticorp-scalable business around selling less of more. In this case, the problem is taken care of: The music labels are selling nothing in China now.