iPod/iPhone Rumors

After reading http://www.vobtomp4.com/blog/2011/02/13/sony-may-withdraw-all-music-and-games-from-apple-itunes-store/ from vob to mp4, I have some comments about it.

Sony should cool down, and think hard about what they may be doing. Pulling out of iTunes is not a good business decision. Do they play to pull out of Amazon? Look at the number of cd stores out there. They are going out of business because of online services.

Sony by itself will never be the powerhouse Apple, or Amazon will be. As a general rule, people will buy music tune by tune, or album by album. Paying a subscription is also a dying thing. If I was an artist, and Sony told me they are no longer selling my music in iTunes, but not to worry, they are going to keep me in their unlimited service, and it will be amazing. I would be calling my attorney to get out fo the contract with Sony to join one of the other three. With all the free music, out there, like streaming radio, and others, Sony is very lacking. They think people will come to them because they have the artist. According to one article, if sony pulls out of iTunes, it will be suicide, and amazon will be the big boy on the block. iTunes works well, and makes Sony money. To think we can do better, and make more money, Sony is living a pipe dream. Everytime I hear “we can do it better on our own” that is a sure sign that failure will happen. May be not right away, but it will happen. To make a music service work, you need all the main music services/ or the four big players. You cannot just do it omw you own, and hope the other three will join in. Apple makes them too much money. Think this out sonny. Do not step on the customers that buy your music. It will only be your downfall.

As usual, some one is blowing the Sony guy’s statements way out of proportion. What he’s saying is that Apple has the lion’s share of the market in downloadable music, but that if there were a big enough competitor in that market, it would give Sony some leverage in negotiating with Apple. All of that is really obvious. Even if that were to happen, though, as long as Apple has millions of iPods and iPhones out there, Sony would never actually be able to pull all of its catalog from the iTunes store. Absolutely no one who buys music or listens to music cares which recording company produces music content, at all. Therefore, no single major recording company (of the four that are left) has any independent leverage relative to the others. What that means is that no single major recording company can build a competing distribution network, because it would only be able to sell its own recordings – and again, no consumer has loyalty to a recording company of that size. The biggest contenders for downloadable music other than Apple are Amazon and Microsoft. Even in the latter two cases Apple has the advantage with regard to international distribution. So this is all meaningless noise.