Archive for the ‘internet’ Category
Another déjà vu in digital music: Spotify offers discounts to university students, à la Napster 2003
Spotify announced today that university students in the UK who have purchased an NUS Extra Card, will be offered a 50% discount on the price of Spotify Premium — that’s £4.99 on a service for which post-college folks pay £9.99. This sort of “price discrimination of demand” — to use a dismal term from Economics [...]
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People respond to data, or the lack thereof, in interesting ways. Two tendencies that I have encountered as people respond to data (in excess or in shortage) would be that of (1) ascribing rules to the exceptions (i.e., inferring general rules from single case studies), or (2) asserting exceptions to the rules (i.e., highlighting slim [...]
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A case is now headed to the Supreme Court and the decision on this case could have significant implications for the market for copyrighted works here in the US. The question is whether works copyrighted in the US but produced overseas have been “lawfully” produced such that our First Sale doctrine would apply. First Sale [...]
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Spotify’s “Play” button is an unfortunate hack. In the same way that Google’s “Onebox” play button that was momentarily embedded in search pages (remember 2009, anyone?) was a cruddy hack. although somewhat less of an unfortunate hack than Spotify’s. So, what’s the problem? Well, everything comes in three’s so there are three parts to this [...]
Filed under: internet | 2 Comments
Recently at SXSW, Sean Parker apparently predicted that Spotify will overtake iTunes within the next two years—given the former’s present growth rate. I am going to assume the active measure for comparison here is royalties paid during a year period, or revenue earned, not total number of active users or user accounts. Let’s check the math, [...]
Filed under: internet, media | 4 Comments