It seems time is running faster this month than any other previous ones... A whole load of announcements in the music space have stormed the European marketplace in June 2004. To start off, the much awaited announcement of the launch in Europe on June 15th of iTunes was preceded by a few days by the launch of Roxio's Napster UK launch.
Well it seems the studios are finally sorting out the rights issues in Europe.
Sony's Connect download service is expected to launch on desktops before the end of the year. In the meantime, another division of Sony (Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment) has just launched last week a mobile music download service called Streamman, basically a blend of personnalised services and streaming radio (similar to Rhapsody's service - a Real company). A big congrats to the folks at end2endmobile and packetvideo for making this service live in Scandinavia with TeliaSonera. It should expand shortly into Western Europe and onto the desktop. If you recall well, I was predicting this service only a weeks ago in a post called 'Streaming iTunes'... Had I known it was about to launch ;)
And now the news. The #1 on-line music platform in Europe, OD2, was acquired today by a US company, Loudeye, a much smaller company from what I understand looking at their numbers. From the WSJ Europe: "Loudeye Corp. of Seattle agreed to acquire On Demand Distribution Ltd., a company co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel that is Europe's largest online distributor of music, in a deal valued at least $38.6 million." You will find many comments on the whys of this sale, and on the deal structure. I've posted about it on Pascal's blog. The Register has a great analysis of the deal.
Basically I believe that although it had a B2B strategy, white-labeling its service to the likes of MSN, OD2 was trying to make money as a pure-play, whereas iTunes makes money for Apple by cross-selling iPods... Different numbers, hence different strategy. The difference in download numbers (3m for OD2 in 4 years vs. 85m for iTunes in little over one year), can be explained by consumer uptake but definitively more by analyzing Apple's fantastic global marketing machine. As an example iPod ads appeared all over Europe months before the service was even launched over here...
In the meantime a number of wanabees in this space have delayed their launch of a mobile service in Europe. Fnac is just one example of difficulties industrial heavy-weights (Microsoft, Wal-mart, etc.) are encountering.
Let's hope this B2B strategy will allow Loudeye to reach enough scale to make online music a success, by enabling all the other brand holders to create their own download service...
Then we should probably see consolidation again, as it happened in internet properties (portals, communities, search engines, etc.)
Unless MusicNet decides to react quickly...
